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Introductory notes to the
Semiotics of Music
by Philip Tagg —— Versio n 3: Liverpool/Brisbane, July 1999
THIS DOCUMENT (1999) IS OUT OF DATE.
IT HAS BEEN REPLACED BY various chapters in
‘MUSIC’S MEANINGS’ (2012)
http://tagg/mmmsp/NonMusoInfo.htm
PLEASE USE ‘MUSIC’S MEANINGS, NOT THIS FILE.
Introduction to version 3
This text was part of an ongoing project to produce a textbook in the semiotics of music.
Although this text was used by music students, it was also written with students from
other humanities and social science disciplines in mind. For this reason, the text contains
no musical notation and uses a minimum of unexplained musicological terminology.
Since this text never constituted a final version, it should be understood that many aspects
of the topic are left undiscussed here. There are also no joins between certain sections
and the last few pages are no more than notes and diagrams that require further
explanation not contained within these pages. Please also note that references and the
bibliography are incomplete. Readers are advised that relevant chapters in Music’s
Meanings are more up to date, more reliable, more thorough, more substantial than
this document.
Why bother about music semiotics?
The average citizen of the Western world hears three-and-a-half hours of music a day
and spends an average of $75 a year on music. These figures include babies, pensioners
and the deaf, so those belonging to other population groups are liable to spend even
more time and money with music. However, whereas music is clearly important out
there in the reality of the great public subconscious, it still gets put at the bottom of the
academic heap, together with other options like domestic science. Popular music is especially
unfortunate in this regard because, unlike classical music, unlike many kinds
of jazz, and unlike archaic or exotic forms of folk music, 1 its constant use in the everyday
lives of ordinary people in industrialised society seems to disqualify it from being
dubbed ‘art’ and hence it is deemed to be of dubious legitimacy in the realms of re-
1. Of course, classical music did not become seriously ‘classical’ until the middle of the nineteenth century
(see Stockfelt 1988, Ling 1989, Klingfors 1991, Tagg & Clarida, forthcoming). Many forms of jazz
(e.g. bebop, cool jazz, fusion) have lost their popular status (if they ever had one) while traditional
jazz remains both popular and virtually excluded from higher education.

2 P Tagg: Notes on Semiotics of Music Why bother about music semiotics?
search and higher education. The reasons behind academe’s problematic relationship
with popular music are too complicated to explain here, but its symptoms are clear:
while claiming to be the torchbearer of rationalism, academe treats public expression
and systematisation of the emotional and corporeal in an irrational fashion. It allows
music and dance to enter its realms only if siphoned off to the metaphysical antechamber
of ‘art’ and banishes other music and dance off to the ghetto of ‘entertainment’ outside
its walls.
Recently, however, higher education has made at least token gestures in the direction
of popular culture but music and dance have been poor relatives in this family of new
immigrants to academe. Inadequately resourced and severely understaffed, popular
music studies tend to be housed in a variety of departments: English, communication
studies, music, cultural studies, for example. The presence of our subject in higher education
may be expanding, but it is still certainly very much more the exception than
the rule.
Still, rather than deplore the undemocratic character of academe and its elitist attitude
to the vast majority of the population and their music, it is more productive to consider
what can be done to improve the quality of music studies. Certainly, the study of popular
music has, in the few places it exists and is known, revolutionised the analysis of
music in much the same way as ethnomusicology has challenged traditional theories of
music since the start of this century. However, musically immanent studies of popular
music studies are still few and far between, the main boost for popular music studies
coming originally from sociologists who, as early as the nineteen-thirties, identified the
importance of music in the construction and maintenance of social patterns in industrialised
cultures. With the postwar baby boom and a radical restructuring of industry
and education, there were deep demographic changes in the USA and Europe. These
changes concurred with the spread of rock music. Sociologists and journalists of the
rock generation (born 1940 – 1955) have written extensively about the role of rock since
the late sixties. As sociologists Frith and Goodwin (1990:1) point out:
the sociology of pop and rock is rooted in two non-musical concerns: the meaning of ‘mass
culture’ and the empirical study of youth (and delinquency). 2
This statement largely sums up the nature of most sociological writing on pop and rock.
However, fully realising that observations about relationships between music and society
demand that the music be described as well as society, scholars like Frith and
Laing have on several occasions asked explicitly for help from musicians and musicologists.
Their calls have not had much response because most cultural theorists and sociologists
do not feel comfortable in the world of pentatonic majors, E minor sevenths,
anticipated downbeats, digital delay and quantising, while musicians are socially encouraged
to stay in the ghettos of anti-verbal ‘art’ or ‘kick-ass’ for the sake of their own
muso credibility. On top of that, musicologists are hampered not only by the discipline’s
demands to stick to the classical or ethnic canon for legitimate objects of study,
but also by an arsenal of terms developed to describe the workings of music whose
means of expression and basic dynamics of composition and performance are often a
long shot from the world of Fats Domino, The Animals, James Brown, Abba, AC/DC,
Living Color, Cheb Khaled or Oasis.
There are two paths out of this dilemma. Musicians / musicologists have to change musicology
and sociologists / cultural theorists have to change sociology and cultural
studies. From the muso side our task is threefold: we have to [1] adapt and renew the
analytical arsenal of concepts musicology uses to describe sounds referred to as ‘musical’;
[2] make our descriptions of music accessible to intelligent people who don’t know
2. Quoted by Tamlyn (1997: 6-7).

General semiotic concepts P Tagg: Introductory notes to the Semiontics of Music 3
what a diminished seventh is; [3] become less coy about music as communication and
abandon the muso guild mentality that imagines there to be an antagonistic contradiction
between musical creativity and intellectual inquiry into music.
At the same time, non-musicians and non-musicologists will have to throw their fashionable
but obsolescent metatheories of culture overboard for a while and devote themselves
a little more to thinking about music in the society they say they want to
understand. In Frith’s and Goodwin’s terms, they could go less for the macro ‘meaning
of “mass culture”’ and a little more for ‘the empirical study of youth’ or whatever other
population they see as using popular music. After all, without the sounds that move
people, young or old, to boogie on down, feel sad and wistful, or part of a group, there
is no social context of music to study, no real music to theorise about.
What is missing from both sides is the will and ability to connect music as sounds with
the society in which it exists, which influences it and which it influences. This means
discovering which sounds mean what to whom in which context. And this, obviously,
is a semiotic matter. 3 That is why the rest of this text is devoted to (a) basic semiotic terminology,
(b) a definition of ‘music’ and ‘musical structures’, (c) a sign typology of music,
(d) how music can be studied semiotically without knowing what a diminished
seventh is.
General semiotic concepts
THIS IS ALL MUCH BETTER AND MORE SUBSTAN-
TIAL IN CHAPTER 5 OF ’Music’s Meanings’
Semantics, semiology, semiotics
Words like ‘semantics’, ‘semaphore’, ‘semiology’ and ‘semiotics’ derive the first of their
morphemes from the Greek word séma (s∆ma), meaning ‘sign’.
1. Semantics is a term used in three ways. [1] Coined in 1897 by French linguist Michel
Bréal, ‘semantics’ originally meant studying change of meaning in language, i.e. a
sort of expanded etymology. 4 [2] However, ‘semantics’ is generally used in a wider
sense to refer to studying the interpretation, message and meaning of any communication
system, a useful dictionary definition of ‘semantics’ being ‘the study of the
relationships between signs and symbols and what they represent’. 5 [3] The word
‘semantics’ is also used in linguistics in contradistinction to ‘syntax’ (formal relationships
of one sign to another without considering their meaning) and ‘pragmatics’
(use of language in concrete situations).
2. Semiology is a term coined by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and meaning
basically the same thing as the more general meanings of ‘semantics’ and ‘semiotics’.
Saussure defined sémiologie as the ‘science which studies the life of signs within
the framework of social life’. 6
3. Semiotics is a term coined by US-American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.
This word also refers to the scientific study of sign systems (symbolic systems). The
dictionary definition states that ‘semiotics’ is ‘the study of signs and symbols, especially
the relation between written or spoken signs and their referents in the physi-
3. [**End of Laing 1969].
4. Etymology means studying of the origin of words and how they acquired their meaning(s).
5. All English dictionary definitions from The New Collins English Dictionary , London 1982.
6. … ‘science qui étudie la vie des signes au sein de la vie sociale (Saussure); Science étudiant les systèmes
des signes (langues, codes, signalisations, etc.)’. All French dictionary definitions from Le petit
Robert , Paris 1970.

4 P Tagg: Notes on Semiotics of Music General semiotic concepts
cal world or the world of ideas.’
Which word(s) to use?
Native speakers of French tend to use sémiologie while Anglophones and Italians seem
to prefer ‘semiotics’ when referring to the systematic study of sign systems. As can be
seen from the preceding paragraphs, all three words can mean basically the same thing.
This confusion is likely to be resolved in a similar fashion to the VHS versus Betamax
battle in which the latter and more adequate system was ousted by the former, which
was more widely used and marketed. Strictly speaking, ‘semantics’ should be used to
refer to studying interpretations, messages and meanings in a sign system, this being
— at least theoretically — distinguishable as a subset of activity inside semiotics (or
semiology). In this text, however, we shall be using the word semiotics to denote the
systematic study of signification.
Peirce’s basic sign typology
Icon
Icons are signs bearing physical resemblance to what they represent. Such resemblance
can be striking, e.g. photograph, (traditional) painting, but maps and certain types of
diagram are also iconic because there is structural resemblance (though not striking)
between them and what they purport to represent. The representation of rising and falling
pitch, of legato slurs and staccato dots in musical notation can also be qualified as
iconic.
Index
Indices are signs connected by spatio-temporal proximity or by causality to what they
represent. Examples of causal indices are smoke meaning fire or dark clouds meaning
rain. This sign type is particularly important in music semiotics. Indeed, all musical
sign types can be viewed as indexical in this Peircean sense. 7 Verbal language’s metonymies
and synecdoches are indexical and therefore useful concepts in music semiotics.
Metonymy uses phenomena connected in time or space to refer to each other, e.g.
‘Champagne’ signifying a certain type of wine because it happens to be produced in a
region of the same name. A synecdoche is a part-for-whole expression, for instance ‘the
crown’ meaning the monarch and royal power in toto, not just a bejewelled piece of
metal headgear, or ‘50 head of cattle’ meaning not only the animals’ heads but 50 complete
bovine beings.
Conventional or arbitrary sign (‘symbol’)
In Peirce’s terminology, a symbol is only connected by convention with what it represents.
To avoid confusion, I shall call Peirce’s symbol arbitrary sign or conventional sign.
Examples of conventional signs are ‘table’, ‘because’, ‘grass verge’, ‘think’, ‘but’, ‘grateful’,
‘pullover’, ‘semiotics’ and most other words and verbal phrases in any language.
These signs are called conventional or arbitrary because it is supposed that there is
nothing apart from convention preventing a word like ‘theology’ from denoting a canopener,
whereas it is unlikely that an indexical sign like ‘Champagne’ will ever mean
Polish vodka or denote a lawn-mower, and impossible that smoke from a fire will mean
the fire has gone out or that you have run out of sugar. In this sense, conventional signs
(Peirce’s ‘symbols’) can also be called ‘arbitrary signs’ because the relationship between
7. For convincing arguments on the intrinsic indexicality of all musical signs, see Karbušicky 1986. See
also ‘Anaphone’ (p. 25) and ‘Genre synecdoche’ (p. 28).

General semiotic concepts P Tagg: Introductory notes to the Semiontics of Music 5
signifier and signified is not primarily based on structural similarity (icons), proximity
or causality (indices). 8
8. Arbitrary: not absolute; founded on (personal/collective) whim, convention, habit etc. Arbitrary
signs cannot originate as such since without other initial types of semiotic relationship (e.g. icons or
indices) it would be impossible to develop the conventions on which arbitrary signs rely for their subsequent
denotative qualities. See our description of the origins of the word ‘broadcast’ (under ‘Semiosis’,
p. 7, ff.) and recent critiques of the primacy of denotation (footnote 12, p. 7).

6 P Tagg: Notes on Semiotics of Music General semiotic concepts
‘Symbol’ and ‘sign’: Saussure and Peirce
Whereas the Peircean term ‘symbol’ means signs whose connection to what they represent
is neither homologous9 (icons) nor causal (indices) but rather conventional or arbitrary,
‘symbol’ in Saussurean discourse has more or less the same meaning as ‘sign’
for Peirce. This means that whereas a French semioligist might qualify music as a ‘symbolic
system’, your average Anglo-Saxon academic ought really to refer to it as a ‘sign
system’ or ‘semiotic system’. However, there is no guarantee for such linguistic coherence
amongst linguists. For instance, US-American scholars Berger and Luckmann
(1967) use ‘symbolic universe’, not ‘sign universe’ or ‘semiotic universe’, to denote a set
of signifying practices used by any population for defining/constructing its own cultural
identity by simultaneous inclusion (of ‘us’) and exclusion (of ‘them’).
In the light, or darkness, of such terminological disorder, the main thing is to make first
sure you know what you’re talking about when it comes to signifying various types of
signification and then to explain clearly, to whoever hears or reads your words what
you mean by ‘sign’, ‘symbol’, ‘semantics’, ‘semiology’, ‘semiotics’, etc. As long you
know what you mean and as long as your readers can relate to what you write, your
work should be terminologically acceptable.
Even if Saussure’s terms get a raw deal in the world of Anglo-Saxon semiotic terminology,
there is one pair of Saussurean concepts that has prevailed: signifiant - signifié, i.e.
the relationship between signifiers (signs) and signifieds (what the signs stand for). 10
Denotation and connotation
Table 1: Smoke alarm: connotation as superelevation of previous signification
Signifier Signified
Signifier Signified
Signifier Signified
Danger! Get out!
alarm noise smoke
fire
The word ‘fire’ denotes the object / phenomenon fire. Fires can be quite different but
whether it’s an oil refinery conflagration or a tiny Primus stove, it’s still a fire. In other
languages, matches or cigarettes burning would also be denoted as feu, fuoco, fuego, fogo,
eld, vuur, Feur, etc. (i.e. ‘fire’), whereas English is probably alone in calling encased, electrically
heated elements ‘fires’ (unless such ‘fires’ are in fact toasters). Still, as long as
we aren’t referring to electric fires running smoothly, English speakers do say ‘where
there’s smoke there’s fire’. That saying is based on observations of a simple indexical
type between smoke and fire: smoke ‘means’ fire indexically due to the causal relationship
observable between the two. Now fit your smoke alarm as instructed. It is triggered
off by smoke from fire. You hear it and, if it is not a false alarm, you know it
‘means’ fire and a lot more, like get out of bed, rush out of the house and don’t die. In
that case, the alarm sound does not denote fire arbitrarily like the word ‘fire’, nor does
it mean fire indexically like the smoke you see that is caused by a fire you can’t necessarily
see. The relationship between the smoke alarm sound and fire is one of connotation:
the alarm connotes a particular sort of fire and everything that you know goes with
it because the relationship between the alarm sound as signifier and the object fire as
signified presupposes previous levels of signification. These previous levels are in this case
all indexical and causal, namely the relationships [1] between the alarm sound and
smoke, [2] between smoke and fire, [3] between fire and danger. With these previous
9. Homologous: having a related or similar position, structure.
10. The corresponding concepts for Hjelmslev (French linguist of Danish extraction), would be ‘expression’
instead of ‘signifier’ and ‘content’ instead of ‘signified’.

General semiotic concepts P Tagg: Introductory notes to the Semiontics of Music 7
levels of signification you are able to connote the specific threats of multiple burns, asphyxiation
and possible death with the noise of a smoke alarm.
Using Eco’s model of communication (1976: 54, ff.), you can say that connotation arises
when a signification is conveyed by a previous signification, which gives rise to a superelevation
of codes of the following type. Such a superelevation of codes is what
Hjelmslev called connotative semiotics. Its form is, in the case of a smoke alarm, shown
as table 1. 11
According to Eco, ‘there is a connotative semiotics when there is a semiotics whose expression
plane is another semiotics’. So, in the smoke alarm example, the signified (content)
of the former significations — ‘the alarm is triggered off by smoke’, ‘where there’s
smoke there’s fire’, ‘fire can be destructive’ — becomes the signifier (expression) of a
further signified (content). Thus the smoke signifies fire indexically, but the sound of
the smoke alarm connotes both danger and evacuation associated with fire thanks to the
previous semiotic relationships between [1] the alarm noise and smoke, [2] smoke and
fire and [3] fire and destruction. Eco (1976: 55) goes on:
The difference between denotation and connotation is not... the difference between ‘univocal’
and ‘vague’ signification, or between ‘referential’ and ‘emotional’ communication, and so on.
What constitutes a connotation as such is the connotative code which establishes it; the characteristic
of a connotative code is the fact that the further signification conventionally relies
on a primary one.
Signification, sign typology
‘Signification’ basically means ‘meaning’. ‘Signification’ is used in semiotics to refer to
the whole complex of how something can be a sign of or a sign for something else. Of
course, signifiers can be related to their signifieds in many different ways. Systematising
such relationships of signification into categories (such as Peirce’s icons, indices
and symbols) constitutes a sign typology. A sign typology of music is presented later
(p. 25–30).
Semiosis
In A System of Logic Peirce distinguished between, on the one hand, dynamic or mechanical
action and, on the other, sign action. The latter he called semiosis. It basically
means the actions and processes by which signs are constructed and transformed, i.e.
how signs acquire and change their meaning. Semiosis is a neglected and misunderstood
area in the study of musical signification, partly because many concepts used in
music semiotics have been imported direct from linguistic semiotics. One problem here
is that, until quite recently, denotation was considered by most linguistic semioticians
to be the ‘basic’ or ‘primary’ type of signification upon which connotative signification
depended for its very existence. 12
The difficulty is that such a position relies heavily on an ahistorical type of synchronic
semantics (looking at a symbolic system at one given point in time in one given culture)
rather than on diachronic semantics (studying meaning as part of a dynamic symbolic
system constantly changing in space and time). Take the word ‘broadcast’ as an example.
Very few people reflect these days over the word’s original meaning because it has
acquired the status of a conventional sign. However, when a word had to be found to
denote the new phenomenon of mass transmission via radio waves, a metaphor (connotative
meaning) was chosen to cover the new concept, more specifically that of
11. The Eco model uses the Hjelmslev terms ‘expression – content’ instead of the pair ‘signifier – signified’
which is used in this text for reasons of consistency.
12. This ‘traditional’ sort of linguistic semiotics was also embraced to a certain extent by Eco (1976). This
has recently been challenged within linguistics (see Cruise 1988).

8 P Tagg: Notes on Semiotics of Music General semiotic concepts
throwing or scattering things (‘casting’) far and wide, around and about (‘broad’). This
etymology of ‘broadcasting’ and the word’s subsequent transformation from connotative
metaphor into an arbitrary denotative signifier could be qualified as studying the
word’s semiosis, in this case a semiosis contradicting the notion that denotation is ‘primary’
and connotation ‘secondary’. Understanding semiosis involves, inter alia, studying
how interpretations of signs vary or alter from one historical and social context to
another and how such interpretations affect signification.
One example of musical semiosis can be found in the wining pedal steel guitar of mainstream
Country & Western music. This sound may have owed a little to the dobro and
slide guitar techniques of the US south but its most obvious forerunner is the Hawaiian
guitar, highly popular in the USA in the late twenties and early thirties, before the days
of electrification. 13 From having connoted things like ‘Hawaii’ and ‘exoticism’, those
glissando sounds were slowly but surely incorporated into the C&W mainstream, ending
up as style indicators of Country music (see p. 29). Another example is presented
by Tamlyn (1991) in his analysis of the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the UK. The song’s snare
patterns do not feature backbeat hits on 2 and 4 of the bar, standard fare for mid and
late seventies rock, but the offbeat figures of early sixties songs like Twist and Shout and
Let’s Twist Again which in their original context were consistent with fun and energetic
dancing but which fifteen years later, in a punk setting, had acquired an ironic distance.
Of course, similar types of semiosis occur frequently in European art music. Just think
of how bass soloists in Italian opera (e.g. Pergolesi’s La serva padrona) were initially regarded
as vulgar and humorous — they only occurred in opera buffa —, and then consider
the serious dramatic roles they are given in the nineteenth century (e.g. Verdi’s
Otello). Or what about the breakdown of romantic chromaticism into avant-garde serialism,
or the transition of the violin from vulgar fiddle to Louis XIV’s courtly vingt-quatre
violons, or the path of the accordion in the opposite direction, from upper class
novelty to sonic property of the European proletariat?
One major problem has of course been that most semiotic studies of music have been
carried out on European art music with all that such study entails by way of adhering
to a canon of acceptable composers whose works have been given the institutional seal
of everlasting value. The only trouble is that as soon as aesthetic eternity is involved,
semiosis, which by definition implies change and historical relativity, becomes an uncomfortable
matter. However, as can be gathered from the few examples just offered,
historical contextualisation of musical signification is just as important as its cultural
contextualisation with concurrent forms of expression. In short, the same set of musical
sounds does not ‘mean’ the same thing in different cultures or at different times in the
history of the same culture.
Polysemy
‘Polysemic’ — from Greek poly (pol = many) and séma (s∆ma = sign) — means signifying
many things at the same time, i.e. that the same signifier has several different signifieds.
Music is polysemic from the traditional verbal-linguistic viewpoint. 14 For
example, a certain set of musical sounds might make you associate to waving corn, rolling
hills, a woman with long hair strolling through a meadow, the swell of the sea in a
summer’s breeze, billowing sails, a long dress, love, romance, sighs, olden times and a
whole host of other things. There is ostensibly no ‘rational’, verbally denotative, connection
between, say, sails and corn, a long dress and hills, etc. Therefore, from a logo-
13. Bob Dunn and Ernest Tubbs went electric several years before Charlie Christian (jazz). See Malone
(1974).
14. By ‘traditional linguistics’ is meant the old approach within the discipline that is fixated on denotative,
mostly conventional (arbitrary) signs. See footnote 12.

General semiotic concepts P Tagg: Introductory notes to the Semiontics of Music 9
genic (or logocentric) viewpoint, the music giving rise to all those associations would
have to be qualified as polysemic. 15 The same observations could be made about a set
of sounds making you think of streets, concrete, rain, crime, delinquency, flickering
lights, loneliness, etc. 16 However, it should be clear that each of the two sets of sounds
and each of the two sets of associations elicited by those sets of sounds are mutually
exclusive, each covering totally different areas of affective experience. Just because
each one of the two sets of associations contains verbally-denotatively disparate concepts,
it does not mean that they are musically contradictory within themselves. On the contrary,
play the music corresponding to each of those moods to anyone belonging to the
culture in and for which the music was produced and the listeners will be in no doubt.
This misunderstanding about musical meaning being polysemic arises because academe
demands that we present ideas about music not in music but in words: you have
to read these unwieldy words and sentences instead of being able to compare recordings.
If different people within the same culture feel or react to the same music in a similar
way, it cannot be considered polysemic. Or, to turn the tables, what does the word ‘table’
itself mean when spoken in a normal voice with normal intonation? As verbal denotation,
‘table’ is quite monosemic as ‘a flat horizontal slab or board supported by one
or more legs’, but musically it has about the same value as ‘able’, ‘Babel’, ‘cable’, ‘cradle’,
‘fable’, ‘gable’, ‘Grable’, ‘label’, ‘ladle’, ‘Mabel’, ‘navel’ or ‘stable’, each spoken
with the same voice, intonation and inflexion. Still, whereas no musician or musicologist
would dream of calling verbal discourse ‘polysemic’ just because all but the most
onomatopoeic of words are musically ambiguous, semioticians and linguists of the traditional
school still claim music to be ‘polysemic’, just because musical categories of
signification do not coincide with verbal ones. This fallacy is due to the logocentricity
of academic discourse. To make this quite clear, consider the next two points:
1. The semantic field of the word ‘chair’ is vast, ranging from folding tubular plastic
things, via what you sit on in kitchens or dining rooms, via whatever it is that
chairpersons or professors occupy, right through to thrones and voluminously
padded leather or upholstered pieces of furniture in sumptuous drawing rooms or
exclusive clubs: ‘chair’ will do for the lot of them and only the context or qualifiers
will clarify monosemically to what environment and to which activities the ‘chair’
in question belongs. Words, in other words, can be just as context sensitive for their
meanings as music is.
2. The spoken word ‘chair’ is as musically polysemic as someone humming or ‘doodoo-ing’
the first line of God Save The Queen or the guitar riff of Satisfaction is verbally
polysemic. Neither utterance carries clear meaning if judged according to the
irrelevant norms of signification applicable to the other symbolic system. Conversely,
the emotive dimension of a verbal statement can be clarified and made less
polysemic by prosody, i.e. by the ‘musical’ elements of speech — intonation, timbre,
accentuation, rhythm —, just as musical discourse can gain symbolic precision
if associated with words, actions, pictures, etc. locating the sounds in specific
social, historical or natural situations.
In short, precision of musical meaning does not equal precision of verbal meaning. The
two symbolic systems are not interchangeable and would not need to exist as such if
they were. Music and words can never stand in a one-to-one signifier/signified relation
to each other. 17 Some types of conceptualisation are logogenic, others are not. It is in
15. ‘Logogenic’, from Greek l“gow (=word) and g∞now (=type), means conducive to being expressed
in words. ‘Logocentric’ (k∞ntron = needle/point/centre) means centred around or fixated on words.
16. Romantic music and the type of associations it elicits are dealt with in chapter 2 in Tagg and Clarida
(forthcoming). In the same work, Chapter 10 deals with the second set of associations.

10 P Tagg: Notes on Semiotics of Music General semiotic concepts
this way that the sets of associations to the ‘love’ and ‘urban alienation’ pieces mentioned
above must be discussed as musicogenic, not logogenic, categories. They are after
all verbally accurate in relation to music, not to the discourse of traditional
linguistics. To this extent music must be regarded as an alogogenic symbolic system: it
can only be regarded as polysemic from a logocentric viewpoint. 18
Basic communication model
Finally, before approaching matters more musical, we need to establish some kind of
communication model visualising how messages (musical or otherwise) are transmitted
(fig. 1, p. 10).
At the centre of the model you see the central process going from idea (intended message)
through ‘transmitter’ and ‘channel’ to ‘receiver’ and ‘response’. The transmitter
is any individual or group of individuals producing the music — composer, arranger,
musician, vocalist, recording engineer, DJ, etc. The channel or ‘coded message’ is the
music as it sounds and the receiver is anyone hearing the music — the ‘transmitters’
themselves or other people. The ‘intended message’ is what the ‘transmitters’ want to
get across — the right sounds at the right time in the right order creating the right ‘feel’.
Transmitters rarely conceptualise the ‘feel’ in much verbal detail but to give an idea of
the range of ‘feels’ a European or North American musician might consider communicating,
I supply a short list of verbalised examples as table 2 (p. 11). Even though creative
musicians within the European and North American cultural sphere might never
use any of the words in the list to describe their music, they would know how to construct
sounds corresponding to most of these ‘feels’ while codally competent listeners
from the same cultural background would be able to distinguish that music into categories
similar to those listed in table 2 (p. 11).
Fig. 1: Basic communication model
17. See Francès 1972; Imberty 1976: 36.
18. ‘Alogogenic’ = not conducive to be expressed in words.

General semiotic concepts P Tagg: Introductory notes to the Semiontics of Music 11
Table 2: Ethnocentric selection of possible connotative spheres (‘feels’)
Saturday night kick-ass ethereal sublimity erotic tango
beautiful rural loneliness alienated urban loneliness muso jazz cleverness
pomp and circumstance gospel ecstatic acid house body immersion
Dracula’s drooling organ cute little kiddies sex aerobics style
headbanging thrash romantic sensuality bitter-sweet innocence
noble suffering slavery, drudgery wide-screen Western
spaghetti Western medieval meditation hippy meditation
psychedelia evil East Asians nice East Asians
savage Native Americans noble Native Americans slapstick comedy
street-philosophising PI depravity and decadence brave new machine world
cybernetic dystopia death by frostbite twinkling happy Christmas
football match singalong music hall pub song Methodist hymn
pastoral idyll the throbbing tropics violence
horror mystery grace and sophistication
yuppie yoghurt lifestyle sixties sound scorching sun, blistering heat
wide and open smoky dive Arabic sound
West African drums distant bagpipe Barry Manilow ballad
Abba Aphex sound laid-back rock ballad seventies disco
thirties German cabaret Aboriginals inconsolably unjust tragedy
Of course, the list shown as table 2 could go on for ever or include a totally different
selection of ‘feels’. 19 Even this pretty random selection could itself look quite different
if someone else were to stick verbal labels on the same sorts of sound I know I am trying
to connote here with my words. The point here is just to give an idea of what an ‘intended
message’ might be, whether the intentions are conscious and verbalised or intuitive
and conceptualised only as music. So, what happens to ‘the message’ when it
sounds and when it is received? Does the message get out? Does it get across? Does the
receiver show ‘adequate experience or response?’ Taking as examples the first two
‘feels’ in table 2, it would be safe to say that ‘adequate experience or response’ would
come into play if, in the case of intended ‘kick-ass’, the receivers reacted by dancing or
gesticulating enthusiastically, perhaps also joining in by yelling out the hook line of
each chorus. Such activity would, on the other hand, hardly constitute adequate response
to the audience at a Mahler concert: listening in silence and without visible expression
but with deep emotions of ethereal sublimity, not clapping between
movements but giving both conductor and orchestra a good round of applause after
the performance would certainly be more appropriate behaviour. If people sit quietly
during the intended kick-ass or bop around loudly during the intended ethereal sublimity,
or if they hear something intended as delicate and tender in terms of sentimental
tack, or something intended as interesting in terms of horror, then there has been a
breakdown in musical communication. The question to ask in such situations is ‘why?’
What made it go wrong? As a musician, it’s not enough to say ‘they just didn’t like it’
or ‘they don’t understand my work’. There are always solid reasons why musical messages
don’t get across.
19. This sample of ‘feels’ is ethnocentric because ‘West African drums’, ‘East Asians’, ‘Aboriginals’,
‘Native Americans’, ‘Arabic sound’, etc. are all explicitly specified by ethnic qualifiers, while ‘feels’
applicable o any music culture (e.g. ‘grace and sophistication’, ‘violence’, ‘innocence’, ‘horror’) are
presumed to be formulated in a European or North American musical idiom, as though West African,
East Asian, Native American, Aboriginal and Arabic musics were unable to create such connotations.
Unfortunately, this ethnocentricity is necessary in the text at this stage because musical signification,
including music’s connotative spheres, is to a large extent culturally specific.

12 P Tagg: Notes on Semiotics of Music General semiotic concepts
Of course, sometimes it’s the venue. But what is wrong with the venue? Is it the acoustics?
Was there a harsh predelay that was impossible to counteract through mixing,
equalising and speaker placement? Did the violins have to work too hard to make their
notes last in such a dead space? In such cases the intended message does not even get
out into the ‘channel’ (what you as a ‘transmitter’ want to be heard), let alone reach the
‘receivers’. Maybe your performance or recording sounds fine to you but the message
still doesn’t seem to get across. Is it the wrong audience for your music or did you make
the wrong music for them? Perhaps they laugh when they should cry or gape apathetically
instead of shouting and jumping about the place? Most problems of musical communication
are attributable to codal incompetence and / or interference.
Codal incompetence
Codal incompetence in music arises when transmitter and receiver do not share the
same vocabulary of musical symbols.
For instance, having lived in Sweden for many years, I connote a certain cheery accordion
style with a certain type of old-time proletarian fun and games (gammaldans). If I
were to mix a bit of that style into a signature tune for local TV in Liverpool to promote
a bit of positive populist nostalgia for the ‘good old days’ when ‘ordinary people’ were
supposed to have enjoyed themselves in ‘simple honest ways’, Merseyside listeners
would not know what to make of it. It would amount to codal incompetence on my part
as musical transmitter in a Merseyside cultural context, even though the idea might
once have worked quite well in Sweden. Perhaps my local theme tune would be more
communicative if I had tried to emulate the sound of the older popular artists from the
region, maybe a Searchers pastiche for the sixties or Hank Walters’ on accordion for
earlier days. However, even that might fall on deaf ears because younger Liverpudlians
might not even recognise a Searchers sound, let alone Hank Walters. In this latter case
there would also be codal incompetence from the receiving end, since the young audience
would be unable to relate to musical symbols that would be quite meaningful to
me, as well as to older Liverpudlians.
Another, more common and obvious example of codal incompetence is the fact that I
am sure I could not distinguish music for marriage and burial in the majority of the
world’s cultures. Mixing up funeral and wedding music because you can’t hear the difference
between them shows radical incompetence of musical code in the culture concerned.
20
Codal interference
Codal interference 21 arises when transmitter and receiver share the same basic store of
musical symbols but totally different sociocultural norms and expectations. Codal interference
means that the intended sounds get across and are basically ‘understood’ but
that ‘adequate response’ is obstructed by other factors, such as receivers’ general like
or dislike of the music and what they think it represents, or by the music being recontextualised
verbally or socially.
Returning to rock-and-roll kick-ass for example, those that primarily hate the sounds of
heavy metal and associated genres (and then attack the music’s lyrics and lifestyle) do
not necessarily misunderstand the music. They are codally competent enough to know
that it is supposed to be loud and powerful, that its singers and soloists are supposed
to yell and scream, that it is supposed to make its listeners shout, extend arms in huge
20. For further examples, see Tagg (1993).
21. Thanks to Martin Cloonan (Liverpool, 1992) for useful critique, improvements and additions to the
next few paragraphs.

General semiotic concepts P Tagg: Introductory notes to the Semiontics of Music 13
V-signs, move the body about quite heavily, and that this sort of activity is best experienced
at venues where lots of people are doing it all together at the same time. Heavy
metal protagonists (soloists) have to be loudmouthed and loud-gestured because the
instrumental backing they have set themselves to be heard above, just like the society
they and their audience live in, would otherwise drown their voice and they would disappear
inaudibly and invisibly into an amorphous mass of sound and society. Heavy
metal haters know that nice guys and good girls, with a well-mannered, reserved and
demure behavioural strategy for social success are out of the question in heavy metal
aesthetics: you need vulgarity, lavish amounts of ego projection and plenty of loud
noise to make the music work. Now, if you have invested lots of energy into cultivating
a nice-guy or good-girl identity as strategy for social survival and none into nourishing
the loudmouthed self-celebratory parts of your body and soul, you will find the latter
anathema, not only because good (loudmouthed) heavy metal spits upon the nice guys
and good girls in its lyrics, lifestyle and music, but also because you are scared of the
vulgar loudmouth and garish slob inside yourself that you have worked so hard at repressing
in order to please those in authority as a means to gaining social power and
approval. You understand the music only too well but your sociocultural norms, intentions
and motivations interfere severely with any feelings of cathartic desperation, liberation
or self-celebration that the music might give to others.
Of course, codal interference can work in the opposite direction if you imagine heavy
metal fans incapable of deriving any enjoyment from Baroque recorder music. The delicacy
and small but effective means of expression associated with this type of music can
easily become a taboo area of affective and gestural activity for those who experienced
alienation and failure at school, perhaps those whose peer group enthusiasm and social
restlessness got them thrown out of class, those who hated having to learn the recorder,
or who resented the successful upper middle class pupils and teachers who seemed to
love classical music so much.
If social and psychological fear or resentment of certain music and what it is heard as
representing interfere with the communication of intended musical messages, deep
identification with a certain music can do the same in reverse. In 1972, for example, the
Strawbs, a politically conservative English band, recorded a tune called Union Man in
which they parodied a trade union member in the lyrics and a proletarian pub or music-hall
singalong ‘feel’ in the music, i.e. politics, people and music they did not like.
Unfortunately for the Strawbs but fortunately for the workers’ movement, the British
left loved it and adopted it as their own anthem on picket lines. Codal interference
arose because of diametrically opposed political views and divergence of cultural identity
between transmitter and receiver. In this example it is also clear that codal interference
is related to codal incompetence because The Strawbs had radically
misunderstood the British record-buying public’s store of symbols.
Sometimes the words of a song can interfere with your reception of the musical message.
For example, if you had sung the well-known Welsh hymn tune Cwm Rhondda
with its original words ‘Guide me, O thou great Jehovah!’ for twenty years in chapel
and then, for the first time, heard the rugby club sing it with lewd lyrics as you walked
past the pub one night, it is doubtful whether you would ever sing it or feel it the same
way ever again. Similarly, visual, narrative and social contexts of music can also interfere
with its message: the pub and the church just cited may be one example of mutually
antagonistic contexts. Another would be TV commercial uses of music you already
know from previous situations with different areas of connotation, for example
Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra for copying machines, Dvorák’s New World Symphony
for sliced bread in an Northern English industrial town, or Muddy Waters’ Hoochy
Coochy Man for young white males in jeans in a US desert. 22 In the cases just mentioned,

14 P Tagg: Notes on Semiotics of Music General semiotic concepts
interference takes place in several ways. If you knew the music and grasped its connotations
before seeing the commercial, your previous connotations are certainly interfered
with, just as in the Cwm Rhondda case. If you didn’t know the music before seeing
the advert and then heard the music in something resembling its original setting — live,
on the radio or from a record — you would associate to the advert because you heard
the music first in that context. In both instances there is codal interference, partly because
the sociocultural norms and expectations of the advertisers reusing the music are
not consistent with those of the original transmitters. But there is also a whole complex
of inconsistency between the two receiving ends, as well as [a] between the receiving
end of the original and the transmitting end of the advert and [b] between the transmitting
end of the original and the receiving end of the advert. The nature of these inconsistencies
will, moreover, vary depending on who you are, whether you knew the
original or not and, if so, what it meant to you.
In any case, interesting semiosis can arise from such confusion because unintended responses
and connotations, including lack of response (both to the right of the receiver
in fig. 1, p. 10), will affect the common store of symbols and the store of sociocultural
norms and expectations shared by transmitter and receiver in the same music culture.
For example, Nessun' dorma, thanks to its association with the World Cup in Italy
(1990), ended up in the UK charts, thereby challenging the identification of classical
music, sung in Italian, with ‘class’ (in the sense of upper class). Another possible ‘example’
could be the appro-priation of African-American rap music by white middle class
males in the USA, leading to different re-identifications of the genre by black and white
US-Americans. There are, after all, precedents: in swing, when white bands got all the
gigs and radical black jazz musicians developed bebop; in ‘free’ jazz, when white musicians
got the hang of bebop; in sixties electric blues, when Clapton, Mayall and The
Stones all started and black US-Americans went for a Gospel sound (see Haralambos
1974). The sociocultural norms and expectations change in the two cultures, this bringing
about a redefinition of signifieds in the genre’s store of symbols. 23
Codal incompetence and interference are in other words vital to change the music of
any culture. The store of common symbols and of sociocultural norms interact to produce
new signifiers for old signifieds, while old signifiers fall out of use or are redefined
as connoting the archaic. The norms and symbol boxes at the top and bottom of
figure 1 (p. 10) should not in fact really be separate since both social norms and musical
symbols are in a constant state of change, as is the relation of both transmitter and receiver
to those incompletely shared stores (boxes) of artifacts, norms and ideas.
Recap
So far we have discussed some of the more important ‘semio’ words and their application
to music. We have also proposed a rudimentary model for musical communication,
suggesting a few ways in which musical meanings change according to
paramusical and social context. However, we have so far given the impression that
‘music’ is an unproblematic term, or, at least, that everyone reading this text has the
same idea of what music actually is. It is therefore time to posit a working definition of
‘music’ and to put forward some general ideas about the specificity of musical communication,
i.e. to try and explain how and why ‘languages’ of music are different from
words or pictures as symbolic systems.
22. The adverts are: (1) Copiatrici Gevafax on RAI (Italy), 1985; (2) unknown, recounted by Dutch colleague,
mid 1980s;
(3) Hovis bread on ITV (UK), late 1980s; (4) Levi 501 jeans, MTV Europe, c. 1990.
23. See Floyd (1995: 5-8, 96-98, 212-213), explaining Gates’ (1988) notion of ‘The Signifying Monkey’ in
relation to music.

The specificity of musical communication P Tagg: Introductory notes to the Semiontics of Music 15
The specificity of musical communication
THIS IS ALL MUCH BETTER IN
CHAPTER 2 OF ’Music’s Meanings’
What is ‘music’?
Many peoples have no word equivalent to whatever we seem to mean by ‘music’. For
example, the Tiv people of West Africa (Keil 1977) and the Ewe of Togo and Eastern
Ghana do not seem to have had much need to single out music as a phenomenon needing
verbal denotation. Actually, this is not entirely true, because the Ewe do use the
English word ‘music’, but only as a loan word from British colonialism to denote such
phenomena as hymn singing and what comes out of a cassette recorder or the radio.
The music (in our sense of the word) they make themselves in traditional village life
has no equivalent in the Ewe language.
Vù really means ‘drum’ and há is the word for ‘club’, association or organisation. A vù há is
the club you belong to in the village. You could belong to a club with fast or slow drums, depending
on your character and family. ‘Voice’ is called bá, so ‘singing’ is vù bá. Vù is used to
signify the whole performance or occasion: the music, singing, drums, drama and so on. 24
Some eurocentrics might feel tempted at this juncture to argue that agrarian communities
sporting very little by way of ‘high’ culture don’t need a word for music because
their societies are so ‘simple’, the subtext being that ‘they’ don’t need to distinguish so
accurately between concepts as ‘we’ do in the ‘developed’ world. Aside from the racist
overtones of this objection, we are also faced with the problem that the Japanese, with
their long-standing traditions of music and theatre in official religion and at feudal
courts, did not feel obliged to invent a word equivalent to the European concept of ‘music’
until the nineteenth century. The Japanese translated ‘music’ as ongaku, on meaning
sound and gaku enjoyment, i.e. sounds performed for listening enjoyment. 25 Why
didn’t the Japanese and the Ewe need a word for what we mean by ‘music’ until the
nineteenth century? Because what we mean by music did not exist independently: it
was an integral part of a larger whole (drama, singing, dancing etc.). With the word ongaku,
the Japanese went straight to the heart of the matter and identified the European
notion of ‘music’ as referring to the nonverbal sounding bits of what they had previously
considered as part of a far larger set of phenomena and practices. The Ewe reacted
similarly, all European music being labelled ‘music’ because it was not an integral
part of any Ewe practices and because the Europeans themselves seemed to treat it as
a separate set of phenomena and practices.
It is also worth knowing that our own current notion of music is probably between 700
and 1600 years old, i.e. that it seems to have been first used in the modern sense in the
fifth century and that it was probably current in most European languages by 1400.
This means that ‘music’ is a relatively recent addition to the European arsenal of concepts.
How did its present meaning come about?
The classical Greek word musiké (mousik∆) is short for musiké techné (mousik∆ t∞xnh)
which refers to the skill and art of the muses. This term resembles the Ewe vù and Japanese
gaku concepts, mentioned above, in that it included virtually everything from po-
24. Conversation with Klevor Abo, Göteborg, 2 November 1983.
25. Lecture by Prof. Toru Mitsui (Kanazawa University) at IPM, Liverpool, February 1993, cf. nogaku
(music and movement in No theatre), hogaku (stylised indigenous music), gagaku (courtly music
and dance). The Welsh word for ‘music’, cerddoraeth, contains three morphemes: (i) cerdd, meaning
song or poem; (ii) -or, being similar to the ‘or’ at the end of ‘inventor’ or ‘councillor’; (iii) -aeth, roughly
equivalent to the -ship, ending of ‘musicianship’. Cerddoraeth, translated as ‘music’, therefore literally
means the art of those who make songs or music. Cerddor , it should be noted, is Welsh for ‘musician’.

16 P Tagg: Notes on Semiotics of Music The specificity of musical communication
etry and drama through painting to our ‘music’. The ancient Romans seem to have had
a similar set of signifieds for their musica as the Greeks had for mousik∆. Sometime during
the Hellenic merchant period, however, there is a shift in the meaning of Greek
musiké and Latin musica in learned circles, so that Saint Augustine (d. 430), worrying
about the seductive dangers of music, seems to use ‘music’ (musica) in our contemporary
sense of the word:
Through an indiscreet weariness of being inveigled do I err out of too precise a severity: yea,
very fierce am I sometimes in the desire of having the melody of all pleasant music, to which
David’s Psalter is so often sung, banished from mine own ears and out of the whole church
too. 26
It seems likely that this more restricted use of the word musica prevailed amongst scholars
and clerics in Europe (those that spoke Latin) from the fifth century onwards. 27
Moreover, Arab scholars between the eighth and thirteenth centuries used the Greek
word musiké (al musiqi) to refer to what we mean by ‘music’ today, not to the gamut of
artistic expressions denoted by the musiké of Plato or Aristotle. 28 It is important to bear
in mind here that Arabic music theory sorted under the mathematical sciences (including
al-gebra and al-chemi) and that these theories (both the musical and the mathematical)
were spread all over Europe from the Arab cities of Cordoba and Seville. 29
What happens to ‘music’ in the vernacular languages of Western and Central Europe
before the twelfth century is anybody’s guess. Perhaps, like old Norse or (modern) Icelandic,
there was a blanket term covering what bards, narrators of epic poetry and minstrels
all did. 30 Certainly, the Northern French trouvères and the Provençal troubadours
of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries were not only known as singers, players and
tunesmiths (trouver / trobar = find, invent, compose) but also as jugglers and poets.
‘Music’ comes into the English language in the thirteenth century via old French whose
musique first appeared about a century earlier. The arrival of the word in the vernacular
of both nations as denoting more or less what we mean by ‘music’ today coincides in
other words with the granting of charters to merchant cities and towns (boroughs) and
with the establishment of the first universities. There is hardly enough evidence, even
circumstantial, here to support the claim that the crystallisation of the term music coincides
with the ascendancy of a merchant class, even though the Hellenistic period, Arab
mercantile hegemony in the Mediterranean and the establishment of European boroughs
with their up-and-coming bourgeoisie, 31 all seem to feature the new word. In
any case, the matter ought to be researched further. Here I just want to extend the hypothesis
a little further, more particularly into the realms of religion.
Mohammed himself is said to have shown interest in music and the Koran contains no
directly negative pronouncements against music. However, orthodox clerics of Islam
were soon to qualify music as the work of the devil, the main controversy being whether
or not the Prophet’s judgement of ‘poets’, including musicians, in the Koran’s 26th
sura referred to music connected to infidel rites or to music in general. 32
26. Strunk 1952: 73-74, quoting Saint Augustine's Confessions II (London, W Heinemann, 1912): 165-169.
Translated by William Watts (1631).
27. e.g. Boethius (d. 524), Cassiodorus (d. 562), Isidoro de Sevilla (d. 636), Odo de Cluny (d. 942), Guido
d’Arezzo (d. 1050), all quoted in Strunk 1952: 79-125.
28. e.g. Al-Kindi (9th century), Al-Farabi (870-950), Safi Al-Din (13th). Abu Nasr Al-Farabi’s most important
theoretical work, the two-volume Kitab al-musiqi al-akbir (= ‘A Greater Book On Music’), refers to
Aristotle and treats the physical properties of tones, intervals and scales.
29. Ling 1983: 64, referring to Sigrid Hunke (1971) and Henry George Farmer (1965).
30. [**Tónskald or some such word – check with nordiska språk**].
31. The word borough is of course related to the German Burgen and the French bourgs , words which in
their turn give rise to the denotation of their population as the bourgeoisie.

The specificity of musical communication P Tagg: Introductory notes to the Semiontics of Music 17
Hierarchies of 'music'
I have already quoted Saint Augustine’s fear of music’s seductive forces. An asceticism
similar to that of orthodox Islam emerged also within Christianity. By the eleventh century
a hierarchy of musics had evolved consisting of musica mundana (the music of the
heavens, i.e. the spheres of the universe), musica humana (music providing equilibrium
of soul and body and instilled by liturgical song) and musica instrumentalis (singing and
playing of instruments that were at the service of the devil as well as of God). Manuscript
illuminations, stained-glass windows and many verbal sources of the time make
it quite clear that this trichotomy really meant the following:
In the world of heavenly light sounds the harmonious and well-tuned music of eternity
whose opposite is the unbearable noise and dissonant, untuned music of hell. Both heaven
and hell exist on earth: the music of heaven is reflected in liturgical chant — it is organised,
well-measured and based on science and reason. All other music is of the devil, being chaotic,
ill-measured and uneducated.
Ling 1983:**
Since musica mundana was a more-or-less Platonic ideal of music — the music of the
spheres, of heaven, of God’s perfect creation, so to speak —, the real world contained
only two sorts of music according to the aesthetic and religious hierarchy of the church
fathers: (1) musica humana as the uplifting liturgical song of mother church and God’s
representatives on earth and (2) musica instrumentalis as all other music, whether it be
of the devil or of God. Similar hierarchies of music, often stated as dichotomies or trichotomies,
persist throughout the remainder of European thought to this very day, for
example the art-folk-popular music triangle or the German E- and U-Musik polarity (‘E’
for ernst or ‘serious’, ‘U’ for Unterhaltung or ‘entertainment’). 33
Six general tenets about musical communication
1. ‘Music’ defined
Music is that form of interhuman communication which distinguishes itself from others
in that individually and collectively experienced affective / gestural (bodily) states
and processes are conceived and transmitted as humanly organised nonverbal sound
structures to those creating these sounds themselves and / or to others who have acquired
the mainly intuitive cultural skill of ‘decoding the meaning’ of these sounds in
the form of adequate affective and / or gestural response.
This rather academic sentence, possibly worth re-reading, implies a lot, most of which
is discussed under points 2-6 below. Still, it also means the following:
� there is no music without people, in the sense that sounds which no-one hears
nor makes, even a recording of music running without anyone in earshot of it,
is only potentially, not really music.
� although prosodic aspects of speech — tonal, durational and metric elements
such as inflexion, accentuation, intonation, rhythm, periodicity — are central
to the communication of linguistic meaning, speech cannot function on the
basis of prosody alone and therefore cannot be considered as music in its own
right.
32. They cited traditional sources outside the Koran according to which Mohammed was to have considered
musical instruments the ‘muezzins of the devil’ (Skog 1975)
33. The ‘U’ of U-Musik resembles the ‘U’ of U-Boot, U-Bahn, U-Mensch, i.e. the unter (under/sub/low)
of Unterseeboot (submarine). Untergrundbahn (underground railway) and Untermensch (subhuman).
Other dichotomies used by speakers of German (where the European tradition of instrumental bourgeois
art music was strongest) are those between Kunstmusik or E-Musik on the one hand and Trivialmusik
on the other or between Darstellungsmusik and Darbietungsmusik.

18 P Tagg: Notes on Semiotics of Music The specificity of musical communication
� to become music, sounds that may or may not be considered musical in themselves
must be combined simultaneously or in sequence with other sounds (in
themselves either musical or non-musical) to create sets of sounds that have a
primarily affective or gestural character. For example, the sound of a smoke
alarm is unlikely to be regarded in itself as music, but sampled and repeated
over a drum track or combined with sounds of screams and conflagration edited
in at certain points, it will become part of a musical statement, the purpose of
such composition (human organisation of sounds) being to sonically encapsulate
and communicate a set of affective and gestural states and processes.
2. ‘Music refers to itself’
Direct imitations of or reference to sound outside the framework of musical discourse
(programmatic or onomatopoeic ingredients, see ‘Sonic anaphones’, p. 25) are relatively
uncommon elements in most European and North American music. In fact, musical
structures often seem to be objectively related to (a) nothing outside themselves, (b)
their occurrence in similar guise in other music, or (c) their own contextual position in
the piece of music in which they (already) occur. At the same time, it is absurd to treat
music as a self-contained system of sound combinations because changes in musical
style are historically found in conjunction with (accompanying, preceding, following)
change in the society and culture of which the music is part.
3.‘Music is related to society’
The contradiction between ‘music only refers to music’ and ‘music is related to society’
is not antagonistic. A recurrent symptom observed when studying how musics vary inside
society and from one society to another in time or place is the way in which new
means of musical expression are incorporated into the main body of any given musical
tradition from outside the framework of its own discourse. These ‘intonation crises’ 34
work in a number of different ways. They can:
� ‘refer’ to other musical codes, by acting as social connotors of what sort of people
use those ‘other’ sounds in which situations (see ‘Genre synecdoches’, p. 30).
� reflect changes in sound technology, acoustic conditions, or the soundscape and
changes in collective self-perception accompanying these developments, for
example, from clavichord to grand piano, from bagpipe to accordion, from rural
to urban blues, from rock music to technopop.
� reflect changes in class structure or other notable demographic change, such as
reggae influences on British rock, or the shift in dominance of US popular
music (1930s - 1960s) from Broadway shows to the more rock, blues and country
based styles from the US South and West.
� act as a combination of any of the three processes just mentioned.
4. Musical ‘universals’
Cross-cultural ‘universals’ of musical code are bioacoustic. While such relationships
between musical sound and the human body are at the basis of all music, the majority
of musical communication is nevertheless culturally specific. The basic ‘bioacoustic
universals’ of musical code can be summarised as the following relationships:
� between [a] musical tempo (pulse) and [b] heartbeat (pulse) or the speed of
breathing, walking, running and other bodily movement. 35 This means that
no-one can musically sleep in a hurry, stand still while running, etc. 36
34. Assaf’yev 1976: 100-101.
35. For relation between smaller bodily movements (fingers, eyes, etc.) and musical surface rate, see
Tagg 1997.

The specificity of musical communication P Tagg: Introductory notes to the Semiontics of Music 19
� between [a] musical loudness and timbre (attack, envelope, decay, transients)
and [b] certain types of physical activity. This means no-one can make gentle or
‘caressing’ kinds of musical statement by striking hard objects sharply, that it
is counterproductive to yell jerky lullabies at breakneck speed and that no-one
uses legato phrasing or soft, rounded timbres for hunting or war situations. 37
� between [a] speed and loudness of tone beats and [b] the acoustic setting. This
means that quick, quiet tone beats are indiscernible if there is a lot of reverberation
and that slow, long, loud ones are difficult to produce and sustain acoustically
if there is little or no reverberation. This is why a dance or pub rock band
is well advised to take its acoustic space around with it in the form of echo
effects to overcome all the carpets and clothes that would otherwise damp the
sounds the band produces.
� between [a] musical phrase lengths and [b] the capacity of the human lung.
This means that few people can sing or blow and breathe in at the same time. 38
It also implies that musical phrases tend to last between two and ten seconds.
The general areas of connotation just mentioned (acoustic situation, movement, speed,
energy and non-musical sound) are all in a bioacoustic relationship to the musical parameters
cited (pulse, volume, phrase duration and timbre). These relationships may
well be cross-cultural but this does not mean that emotional attitudes towards such
phenomena as large spaces (cold and lonely versus free and open), hunting (exhilarating
versus cruel), hurrying (pleasant versus unpleasant) will also be the same even inside
one and the same culture, let alone between cultures. One reason for such
discrepancy is that the musical parameters mentioned in the list of ‘universals’ (pulse,
volume, general phrase duration and certain aspects of timbre and pitch) do not include
the way in which rhythmic, metric, timbral, tonal, melodic, instrumentational or harmonic
parameters are organised in relation to each other inside the musical discourse.
Such musical organisation presupposes some sort of social organisation and cultural context
before it can be created, understood or otherwise invested with meaning. In other
words: only extremely general bioacoustic types of connotation can be considered as
cross-cultural universals of music. By consequence, even if musical-cultural boundaries
do not necessarily coincide with linguistic ones, it is quite fallacious to regard music
as a universal language.
5. Music's collective character
Musical communication can take place between
36. Bra Böckers Läkarlexikon, vol 5 (Höganäs 1982: 145-146) states that a well-trained athlete’s pulse rate
can, if measured during sleep, be as low as 40 b.p.m. And that the pulse of a baby in a state of stress
exceeds 200 b.p.m. This coincides with the limits of a metronome, from 40 (lento) to 212 (prestissimo).
37. Musical volume (loudness) must be considered as a culturally relative phenomenon, in that variations
between societies in the loudness of the soundscape (Schafer 1977: 71 ff, 151 ff, 181 ff) will
require ‘loud’ and ‘soft’ to adapt to what is audible above the noise of the soundscape (Tagg 1977: 145
ff).
38. This practice is known as circular breathing. Of course, some musicians (e.g. jazz saxophonist Roland
Kirk and every didgeridoo player) can inhale through the nose and blow out through a wind instrument.
At the same time, there are all sorts of bellowed (e.g. bagpipes, organs), mechanical, electromechanical
and electronic instruments that can make melodies without being hampered by the
restrictions of the human lung. Some people even sing while breathing in. More importantly, neither
percussion instruments (including mbiras, pianos, xylophones as well as drums) nor plucked /
bowed instruments depend on inhalation / exhalation to measure phrases. Nevertheless, studies of
rhythmic or melodic recurrence (reiterative, sequential, varied, etc.) in any music will almost
certainly show that most rhythmic / melodic statements can be perceived as units (motifs or phrases)
seldom occupying less than two or more than ten seconds. Even the didgeridoo player, who inhales
while chanting into a hollow eucalyptus trunk, measures his constant flow of sound with rhythmic
and timbric motifs that also fit in with phrase durations.

20 P Tagg: Notes on Semiotics of Music The specificity of musical communication
� an individual and himself/herself
� two individuals
� an individual and a group
� a group and an individual
� individuals within the same group
� members of one group and those of another.
Specifically musical (and choreographic) states of communication are those involving
a concerted simultaneity of nonverbal sound events or movements, that is, between a
group and its members, between a group and an individual or between two groups.
This means that whereas you can sing, play, dance, talk, paint, sculpt and write to or
for yourself and for others, it is very rare for several people to simultaneously talk,
write, paint or sculpt in time with each other. In fact, as soon as speech is subordinated to
temporal organisation of its prosodic elements (rhythm, accentuation, relative pitch, etc.), it
becomes intrinsically musical, as is evident from the choral character of rhythmically
chanted of slogans in street demonstrations or, even more obviously, from the ‘choir’
of ancient Greek drama. In this way, music and dance are particularly suited to expressing
collective messages of affective and corporeal identity of individuals in relation to themselves,
each other, and their social, as well as physical, surroundings. 39
Musical signification
Musical structures and parameters
If, as we have suggested, music is related to something other than itself, how do such
relationships work? To answer this question, it is first necessary to identify music’s signifiers
and then to try and determine what those signifiers signify. This task begs in its
turn any number of basic methodological questions, the first being ‘what is a musical
structure’? Can a musical structure be defined as an objective quantity in numerical
terms, for example as the range of digital values in a WAV file, or as the values contained
in one of the thousand-odd samples of synchronic sound registered by a CD
player every second it spins round? Is it a sonogram of a one or two-second cut out of
a recorded performance of music?
If, as we have already stated, music is a matter of communication, and if the many binary
values constituting one sample of sound on a CD are phenomenologically meaningless,
because you can’t hear anything lasting a thousandth of a second and because
most people can make no musical sense out of sonogram or oscillograph curves, then
those objective representations of sound are just that and cannot be regarded as structural
units of musical meaning. In other words, all such quantitative representations of
sound may be 99.99% accurate and reliable but their coding is determined in terms of
acoustic physics, not in terms of musical communication. They are designed to represent
what happens sonically without considering with what intentions or effects the
sounds are or are not invested.
To clarify this issue, imagine suggesting to visual semioticians that they base their theories
of meaning in pictures on numerical print-outs of pixel values at a resolution of x
thousand of dots per inch. Now, this suggestion takes no heed of the cultural construction
of Gestalt in visual communication because the art or film scholar, not to mention
the average viewer, is far more likely to go for far larger, culturally relevant aspects of
visual representation, like colour, shape, form, darkness, light, shadow, grain, movement,
visual archetypes, etc. Obviously, this does not mean that pixel counts are irrelevant
to the physical structure of a particular (part of a) picture any more than
39. Even multitracking, overdubs, etc., although frequently performed by the same individual on different
occasions, constitute an intrinsic collectivity of parts or voices.

The specificity of musical communication P Tagg: Introductory notes to the Semiontics of Music 21
quantifiable frequency and amplitude are irrelevant in determining the physical structure
of a particular (part of a) piece of music. It does mean, however, that meaningful
structures of visual or musical communication, although physically identifiable in
terms of minute digital detail, must be based on the relevant cultural practices of both
transmitter and receiver. So, what type of musical structure are we referring to? It is
easiest to answer this question by means of an example in three parts.
The letter example
You are watching a standard Hollywood B-film on TV. You see a close-up of a middleaged
man without any really distinctive features. He is indoors reading a letter. You
can only really see his face and the blank sides of the papers he is reading. The background
interior is indistinct and the lighting quite normal. There are no sound effects.
Gradually you hear menacing music, first with a quiet, synthesized megadrone in low
bass register. It grows louder until temple-piercing electronic screeching sounds on top
of it all. You are about half an hour into the film and the character you see has been solidly
identified as one of the good guys. Under these circumstances the music is hardly
likely to be telling you that he is about to become as nasty as the music sounds: instead,
you understand the music to be telling you that the letter he is reading brings really bad
news.
Now picture exactly the same scene with exactly the same man, the same letter and the
same music, but this time you have had a good half hour’s action to tell you that this
man is an absolute psychopath, not the good guy. In this case the letter does not bring
bad news to the same face on screen because this is someone who delights in blackmailing,
raping, killing and eating people. The music does not tell you what the onscreen
character is feeling because the perpetration of unspeakable atrocities seems to
bring relief to his tortured soul. Instead, it tells you, the audience, what you ought to be
feeling in relation to this man. You are supposed to identify with his victims and be as
scared and horrified as they are.
Finally, imagine exactly the same visuals and situation as in the first example (the good
guy reading the same letter). This time the music is a soft, wavy flute melody accompanied
by a discretely rich string pad and slow acoustic guitar arpeggiations. His face
might not show much expression but the music tells you that she must be very beautiful,
that he loves her and that she probably loves him too.
In all three examples, the visuals are identical. Examples one and two are also musically
identical. If this is so, how do you explain three different interpretations of the same
scene?
The differences between examples one and two are not one of mood: menace and horror
are the order of the day in both cases. The synthesized ‘megadrone’ is a low, continuous
rumbling (like distant thunder and the threat of dangerous weather, like an
earthquake, like a constantly uneasy stomach). These bass sounds reverberate in your
abdominal regions. Similar long and reverberant bass sounds are used by Bach for the
earthquake in the Saint Matthew Passion, by Berlioz for storm at sea in The Trojans, by
circus drummers to dramatise the most spectacularly dangerous high wire acts, by
Conlan and De Vorzon to underscore the menacing mega-saucers of the earth invaders
hanging over Los Angeles in the TV series V, by Angelo Badalmenti for the constant
presence of dark evil in Twin Peaks. Audiovisually primed as we are, we have grown so
used to this sort of sound (timpani rolls, double bass tremolandi, synthesized
megadrones) occurring in conjunction with ominous constant or immanent threat that
we associate directly to all the previous occasions on which we have witnessed such
horror at the movies, in front of the TV, at the theatre, circus, opera, etc. So these musical
sounds seem to refer to earlier occurrences of the same or similar sounds. However,

22 P Tagg: Notes on Semiotics of Music The specificity of musical communication
it is not merely a well-established convention that synth megadrones, drum rolls and
bass tremolandi connote ominous danger, etc. because, as we already noted, there are
links between these musical sounds and homologous sounds ‘outside’ music, sounds
that in themselves have connotations of ominous danger, etc.
A similar double link exists between the high register electronic cluster and its ‘signifieds’.
We are used to hearing mental instability, severe stress and the ‘weird and eerie’
underscored as discords in very high register, such as in the saw tune from One Flew
over the Cuckoo's Nest, or in the well-known Twilight Zone motif. At the same time, just
as loud, low notes will reverberate in abdominal regions of the body, loud, highpitched,
discordant sounds will resound in your head. To put matters simply, splitting
headaches do not tend to occupy the bass register.
In examples one and two we have, simplifying matters, a mood of ominous threat and
harsh, uncanny evil. The only way we can substantiate this reasonable interpretation of
the music correctly is through the narrative context. This means that it is not enough
just to establish semiotic relationships between musical signifier and signified: we also
need to put musical signification into a broader — narrative, social, ideological, etc. —
context to make any real sense out of it.
The difference between examples one and three is musical and therefore one of mood,
affect, gesture and feeling. There is also a difference of narrative context but this time
that difference is provided by the music. The love music works semiotically in a similar
way to the horror. The legato flute tune is wavy, smooth and soft, not jerky, sharp, angular
or harsh. It moves in pitch and time and doesn’t just rumble along constantly like
the megadrone or screech insistently like the electronic cluster. The luscious, consonant,
mid-register string pad leaves no room for holes or attacks and the little acoustic
guitar arpeggios rise and fall regularly in consonance with the tune. In our music culture
we are so used to pretty flute tunes being used in conjunction with pretty faces and
places, so used to viscose, consonant string pads as obligatory accompaniment to anything
sensual, so used to arpeggiated rises and falls as something classical and beautiful,
that it would be silly to start giving examples: we recognise it all, once again, from
previous audiovisual experience. However, the smooth, wavy, gentle character of the
musical sounds is not just part of a cultural convention: they relate also to smooth,
wavy and gentle types of gesturality. Try caressing a pebble dash wall or the contours
of an overhead projector; then do the same to the person you love most.
From these examples it should be clear that music can relate to moods and gestures directly,
through a sort of synaesthetic homology, and indirectly, through the intermediary
of similar music used for similar purposes in similar situations. These links are
discussed in greater detail under ‘A sign typology of music’ (p. 25–30). It should also
be clear that these aspects of musical signification need to be put in the broader context
of concurrent forms of expression (verbal, visual, social, etc.). Still, before going on to
the sign typology where we try to be more systematic about links between musical signifier
and signifieds, it is necessary to establish two more essential terms because the
musical signifiers mentioned so far have been quite disparate: ‘megadrones’, ‘loud’,
‘low pitch’, ‘arpeggios’, ‘string pad’, ‘flute’, etc. Some of these are musical structures and
others (points on) parameters of musical expression. What do these terms mean?
What is a musical structure?
MUCH BETTER IN CHAPTER 7
OF ’Music’s Meanings’
There are two main angles from which it is possible to establish what a musical structure
is and is not: from the transmitting and receiving ends of the basic communication

The specificity of musical communication P Tagg: Introductory notes to the Semiontics of Music 23
model (see p. 10). At the transmitting end, musicians (composers, arrangers,
instrumentalists, singers, etc.) usually take great care in getting the right sounds in the
right order at the right time. By observing how they change what they do and how they
refer to the sounds they are making, it is possible to discern elements or building blocks
(rhythmic and/or pitched, timbral, durational, etc.) of musical production. These elements
can then be posited as structures within the music culture to which those musicians
belong. This means that no musical structure observed in one style, let alone inside one
culture, need function as such in another.
For example, although the difference between E flat (e$) and E natural (e8), as McClary
and Walser (1974: 279) point out, is quite important to both musician and listener in the
context of a Western pop song (whether or not the terms ‘E flat’ (e$) and ‘E natural’ (e8)
mean anything as such to the listeners, they are still affected by the structural difference),
they are irrelevant to Javanese music in the slendro mode which doesn’t use Western
semitones (the pitch difference between e$and e8) at all. Of course, an e$ or e8 on
its own (e.g. played at medium volume on a piano, middle register) has virtually no
connotative value. The communicative value of those tones will depend on their synchronic
and diachronic context, i.e. [a] what instruments or voices playing/singing
what pitches with what timbre how loud in what acoustic space the tone coincides with
and [b] after what and before what, with all the variations mentioned for [a], it occurs.
It will also depend on how you play the note itself, on what instrument, with what tone
quality, in what register, how loud, with what reverb, with or without crescendo, diminuendo,
vibrato, tremolo, phasing, chorus, distortion, pizzicato, flutter-tongue, with
what attack, envelope, decay, etc., etc. Still, as long as changing something in the sound
can change the effect of the sound, even if the difference is as small as two pitches a semitone
apart or between a single backbeat and a single slightly delayed backbeat, these
elements (the e$ and e8, the backbeat and the delayed backbeat) will have to be regarded
as musical structures from the transmitting end. They are, just like all the other muso
terms mentioned above, the sort of verbal signifiers musicians use to designate the
sounds they are trying to get right in the right order at the right time. Therefore, if many
musicians in the same culture use the same sort of term to denote the same sort of sonic
event, there is intersubjective consistency in the nomenclature of musical sounds that
those musicians regard as operative in getting things to sound right in the right order
at the right time. The sounds that those terms refer to can thereby be posited as musical
structures within that culture.
As mentioned above, the e$ or e8 are only really meaningful in a synchronic and diachronic
context: they have little or no interest sounded on their own. More obviously,
the backbeats are by definition contextualised: one occurs exactly on the pulse, the other
slightly after. As more sonic elements are combined, musical structures become
more comprehensive: synchronically as ‘sound’ in the composite rock sense of the
word, as ‘texture’ and ‘sonority’ for traditional musicology, and diachronically as motifs,
riffs, themes, phrases, periods, verses, choruses, passages, sections, etc. Processual
events (musical structures in sequence) ultimately constitute a ‘work’, be it a symphony,
dance record or commercial jingle that has a musical ‘form’, meaning that constituent
elements are presented in a particular, usually recognisable order, e.g. verse -
chorus - verse - chorus - instrumental - verse - chorus - chorus - fade-out (1960s pop
record), or, introduction - first theme - bridge passage - second theme - development
section - recap theme 1 - recap theme 2 - coda (sonata form). From the microlevel of individual,
discrete sounds to the macro-level of musical ‘form’, we are dealing with
terms referring to sonic events that, if changed according to any of the parameters of
musical expression (p. 31, ff.), have potential to change the ‘meaning’ of the music inside
any given style. These sonic events, large or small, are all examples of musical
structure.

24 P Tagg: Notes on Semiotics of Music The specificity of musical communication
The other way to approach the problem of musical structures is from the receiving end.
Here, intersubjectivity must be established between users of the music and observations
be made as to how different people in the same culture respond to the same music
(see p. 34, ff). If the music is identical and if response is similar in the form of behaviour,
associations, moods created, etc., then there is intersubjectivity of response. If, after
that, different pieces of music are played to the same range of individuals in the same
listening situation and if different but intersubjectively consistent response for each
piece is observed, then it is possible to start analysing connections between consistently
different responses and different pieces of music, i.e. to ask what in the music causes
which response. Asking ‘what in the music?’ entails using the ‘transmitting’ version of
‘musical structure’ as a starting point: was it this rhythm, that instrumentation, that
timbre, the contour of that tune, this chord sequence that elicited that response?
Musical structures understood from the transmitting end can often be quite adequate
when it comes to making connections between responses to music and the music eliciting
those responses. However, it is sometimes necessary to jettison traditional ‘muso’
understanding of musical structure because what the builder or architect may need to
know about your house is not necessarily what is most important to you when you live
in it. By the same token, although transposing a piece of music by one semitone can
pose serious restructuring problems from the trans-mitting side, especially if you’re
playing a keyboard or wind instrument, it is quite probable that changing the key of a
piece as little as a semitone from one performance to another would pass unnoticed and
without effect by the majority of listeners who attended both. 40
The main conclusions of this discussion are that definitions of musical structure must,
in a semiotic context, be based on information from both the transmitting and receiving
ends of the musical communication process, but that structural elements identified on
the transmitting side are not necessarily musical signifiers.
Having established hypotheses about musical structures, we now need to discuss how
these structures can act as signifiers, i.e. to discern how they relate to their signifieds.
This task presupposes the existence of a musical sign typology.
40. Transposition problems are less severe on those types of string instruments which can be retuned to
fit the new key. Guitarists can also use a capo. Many synthesizers can be retuned by pressing a few
buttons. Neither piano, nor organ can be retuned without many hours labour. One common reason
for transposition is to enable singers to reach high notes or low notes with greater ease, another to
facilitate performance on certain instruments. Of course, if, by transposition the performance is markedly
improved or impaired, then such transposition will have significance for the listener.

A sign typology of music P Tagg: Introductory notes to the Semiontics of Music 25
A sign typology of music
Anaphone
Genre synecdoche
Episodic marker
Style indicator
Table 3: Sign typology overview
sonic anaphone perceived similarity to paramusical sound
kinetic anaphone perceived similarity to paramusical movement
tactile anaphone perceived similarity to paramusical sense of touch
pars pro toto reference to ‘foreign’ musical style, thence to
complete cultural context of that style
short, one-way process highlighting the order or relative
importance of musical events
unvaried aspects of musical structuration for the style in
question
THIS IS ALL SUBSTANTIALLY IMPROVED AND EX-
PANDED IN CHAPTER 13 OF ’Music’s Meanings’
Basis of the sign typology
The sign typology presented as table 3 is largely based on extensive empirical and analytical
work (Tagg & Clarida, forthcoming). Ten previously unheard title tunes from
film and TV, each lasting between thirty and seventy seconds and with no more than
thirty seconds pause between each example, were played on different occasions to a total
of between 105 and 612 listeners who were asked to write down a short film scenario
for each piece. 41 There was great consistency of response and a reliable spread of varied
response from piece to piece. The associations offered by respondents were crosschecked
with the music eliciting each set of responses. By crosschecking the ten pieces,
and their responses, and by comparing with other music unequivocally associated with
particular movements, pictures, feelings, moods, etc., it was possible to isolate certain
musical structures as consistent with certain responses. Since the way in which musical
structures related to responses and associations varied, it became necessary to systematise
these variations. Hence this sign typology.
Anaphones
Anaphone is a neologism analogous to ‘analogy’. However, instead of meaning ‘imitation
of existing models... in the formation of words’, anaphone means the use the use
of existing models in the formation of (musical) sounds. Anaphones fall into three main
categories.
Sonic anaphones
A sonic anaphone can be thought of as the quasi-programmatic, ‘onomatopoeic’ stylisation
of ‘non-musical’ sound, e.g. Schubert’s babbling brooks, Baroque opera thunder,
William Byrd’s bells, Jimi Hendrix’s B52 bomber. As Rösing (1977, 1978) points out,
sonograms of Schubert’s brooks or of Beethoven’s Pastorale Symphony thunder bear little
objective acoustic relationship to sonograms of the ‘real’ things those musical stylisations
are supposed to represent. But, continues Rösing, this is hardly the point, since
the structural homologies between real and musical brooks or between real and musical
thunder stem partly from cultural convention, partly from the state of development
in sound technology. This dual mechanism explains why Vangelis’s sampled rain
sounds far more like rain than Beethoven’s and why I probably wouldn’t hear the jackal
in Masai music supposed to include sonic-anaphonic allusion to the cry of that ani-
41. Free induction was used to elicit response since no evidence existed suggesting that preselection of
options for multiple choice questionnaires would be reliable.

26 P Tagg: Notes on Semiotics of Music A sign typology of music
mal. Moreover, I’m not a Masai herder and I don’t have much idea of what the sound
of a jackal, stylised or not, actually connotes: maybe they attack cattle at night and destroy
your supply of food, clothes and wealth.
Similarly, unless you were alive in 1968, opposed to the US war in Vietnam, had heard
a bit about Hendrix and Woodstock, were reasonably versed in the pop and rock scene
of the time and recognised the US national anthem, you probably wouldn’t be able to
grasp the full connotations of Hendrix’s mega-glissandi on electric guitar at the of his
version of The Star Spangled Banner. 42 And goodness knows what Vietnamese youngsters
in Hanoi, if they survived the bombardments, would have made of it in December
1972: perhaps it would be just another expression of imperialist aggression in the form
of a lot of incomprehensible and hateful Yankee noise.
In order for a sonic anaphone to work properly, then, listeners must be conversant with
the norms of musical stylisation whereby sounds that are not necessarily musical are
incorporated anaphonically into the musical discourse (‘it’s a brook’, ‘it’s a jackal’, ‘it’s
an aeroplane’). Secondly, the connotations of the ‘non-musical’ sound must be understood
(e.g. ‘brooks flow in the countryside and the countryside is nice’, ‘jackals deprive
me and my family of our livelihood’, ‘the US bombing of Vietnam is horrendous’).
But anaphones are not only sonic; they can also act as structural homologies of touch
and movement. These sign types are simply called tactile and kinetic anaphones respectively.
Tactile anaphone
The most familiar example of tactile anaphones is that produced by slowly moving, romantic
string underscores — ‘string pads’, as the sound is called on synthesizers, because
it pads holes and spaces in the sonic texture. Such string wallpaper, performed
of course by several stringed instruments, rarely solo, can be characterised by its lack
of audible attack and decay and by the relative consistency of its envelope — a parameter
listing of synthesizer string presets reveals this in digital detail —, all frequently
enhanced by extra reverb in recording. String pads can produce the effect of homogeneous,
thick, rich, viscous sonic texture and, by haptic synaesthesia, sensations of luxury,
comfort and smoothness. This observation can be substantiated by noting
nomenclature and in-house descriptions of mood music featuring thick (‘rich’, ‘lush’)
string scoring of phenomenologically non-dissonant sonorities (tactile-kinetic connotations
underlined):
� Lullaby Of The City – home, soft and velvety, gently flowing, quiet, intimate
and restful
� Penthouse Affair – fashions, sweetly melodic, slightly nostalgic but sophisticated,
‘dressed in silk and satin’
� Amethysts for Esmeralda – rich and dreamy;
� Girl In Blue – lush, smooth melody;
� Valse Anastasie – romantic, lush;
� Sequence for Sentimentalists – rich, romantic theme. 43
Viscous string pads have indeed acted and still act as sonic emulsifiers in many a voluptuous
Hollywood love scene and no further documentation should be necessary to
prove the point. 44
42. LP Rainbow Bridge, Reprise K 54004, 1970.
43. These examples of string pad tactile anaphones are taken from the Boosey & Hawkes catalogue.

A sign typology of music P Tagg: Introductory notes to the Semiontics of Music 27
Kinetic anaphones
Kinetic anaphones have to do with the relationship of the human body to time and
space. Such movement can be literally visualised as that of a human or humans riding,
driving, flying, walking, running, strolling, etc. through, round, across, over, to and fro,
up and down, in relation to a particular environment or from one environment to another.
Gallops, marches, promenades, walking basses, struts, cakewalks, etc., not to
mention the rocking, reeling and rolling of rock and roll music, all contain culturally
stylised kinetic anaphones for certain types of human bodily movements. However, kinetic
anaphones can also be visualised as the movement of animals (e.g. flights of bumble
bees, swarms of locusts, stampedes of cattle) or objects (e.g. rocket launches, truck
driving, trains moving, B52s bombing, spinning wheels) or as the subjectivised movement
of objectively stationary objects or beings, e.g. the sort of movement the human
hand makes when outlining rolling hills (pastoral undulation), gentle waves on the sea,
quadratic skyscrapers, jagged rocks, etc. Even stillness can be expressed by kinetic anaphone
through the very lack of explicit metronomic time in relation to the regular beats
of the heart, the regular periodicity of breathing, etc. (e.g. open landscapes like the start
of Borodin’s On the Steppes of Central Asia, the end of Mussorgsky’s Night on a Bare
Mountain, ‘On the Open Prairie’ from Copland’s ballet suite Billy the Kid).
Of course, since the perception of any sound requires the positioning or movement of
a body or bodies in relation to another or others, many sonic anaphones are also kinetic
(e.g. a ‘motor bike’ as fuzzed guitar panned from one side to another, ‘horse hoof’ clipclops
in 2/4 or 6/8 gallop metre). Similarly, some kinetic or sonic anaphones can also
be tactile.
Composite anaphones
Of course, no anaphone is solely sonic, solely tactile or solely kinetic. All sonic anaphones
are simultaneously kinetic because all sounds are heard at specific distances
from the sound source or in spatial relation to one another and because space and distance
both imply movement (even in the sense of no movement or, if there is more than
one sound, as occupying the same rather than another acoustic space). Tactile anaphones
are also kinetic because touch implies movement of one body in relation to another
one, e.g. into, out of, on to, away from, along, past, over, under, etc. Tactile
anaphones are, however, not necessarily sonic. For example, music connoting falling
snow ought to consist of tactile rather than sonic anaphones (as well as being kinetic,
of course) because falling snow is inaudible to the human ear whereas snowflakes upon
the skin provide a definitely tactile sensation. It is on the other hand doubtful whether
a sonic anaphone is ever solely sonic and not also tactile as well as kinetic. The sonic
anaphones for babbling brooks, thudding doors, thunder, splashes, swooshes, swishes,
bangs, crashes, waves breaking, motor bikes etc., etc. also imply not only movement
but also the tactile sensation, potential or real, of those sounds. Similarly, kinetic anaphones
(see previous paragraph) all imply potential sensations of sound and/or touch,
44. However, here are some examples for the sceptical reader (composer and date of film in brackets): (1)
Driscoll and Anne kissing on the boat in King Kong (M Steiner 1932); (2) Olivia de Havilland’s and
Errol Flynn’s romance in Captain Blood (Korngold 1935); (3) Robin and Maid Marion planning their
future together in The Adventures of Robin Hood (Korngold 1938); (4) John Wayne proposing to Miss
Dallas in Stagecoach (Hageman 1939); (5) Paul Henreid and Bette Davis in two love scenes from Now
Voyager (Steiner 1942); (6) Barbara Stanwyck as the luscious but lethal Mrs Dietrichson in Double
Indemnity (Rózsa 1944); (7) Lovely Laura in For the Very Young (Raksin 1944); (8) Lara’s Theme
from Dr Zhivago (Jarre, 1965); (9) Romeo and Juliet (Tchaikovsky 1869), (Rota 1968). (10) Ada’s theme
for that romantically hedonist embodiment of upper-class feminine chaos in 1900 (Morricone, 1976);
(11) The luscious pas de deux from Khatchaturian’s ballet Spartacus used for the swell of the sea and
emotions in a British soap of the seventies entitled The Onedin Line (1974, 1976).

28 P Tagg: Notes on Semiotics of Music A sign typology of music
e.g. musical stylisations or representations of, say, galloping, marching, swarms of
bees, trains moving, etc., all embody real or potential sounds (hooves, boots, buzzing,
steel wheels on rails) and physical sensations connected with those sounds and movements.
In other words, most anaphones are at the same time sonic, kinetic and tactile.
Bernard Herrmann’s famous string music for two gruesome murder scenes in Hitchcock’s
Psycho (1960) provides an excellent example of composite anaphones: [1] sonic,
in that the sound bears structural resemblance to that of either a knife being sharpened
or a repeated scream; [2] kinetic, in that the sound has the same strong, deliberate, regular,
attacking arm movement as Norman Bates’s multiple stabbing of Marion in the
shower; [3] tactile, in that the timbric aspects of Herrmann’s music are sharp, rough,
unpleasant, jagged and piercing, similar to the sensation of skin being cut or punctuated,
the glissando acciacaturas preceding the last six chordal jabs reminiscent of the initial
resistance offered by the outside skin as the knife cuts through to softer layers of
flesh.
Genre synecdoche
Part for whole
The second main category of musical signs is the genre synecdoche. In verbal language,
a synecdoche denotes a figure of speech in which a part substitutes the whole, as in the
expression ‘all hands on deck’. Although, at least from the captain’s view, the sailors’
brawn is worth more than their brain, the sailors’ hands on deck would not be use without
their heads, arms, legs and the rest of their anatomy. Similarly, ‘fifty head of cattle’
means fifty complete bovine creatures, not just their fifty heads. A musical synecdoche
is by analogy any set of musical structures inside a given musical style that refer to another
(different, ‘foreign’, ‘alien’) musical style by citing one or two elements supposed
to be typical of that ‘other’ style when heard in the context of the style into which those
‘foreign’ elements are imported. By citing part of the other style, the citation then alludes
not only to that other style in its entirety but also potentially refers to the complete
genre of which that other musical style is a subset — and here I am using ‘genre’
and ‘style’ in the precise senses defined by Fabbri. 45
Herrmann’s shower murder music from Psycho, played in a concert or radio context to
popular music listeners who did not recognise the piece, might well be perceivable as
a genre synecdoche: since it bears greater structural resemblance to music by Penderecki
than by Abba, it might say ‘contemporary art music’ (style reference) and thereby
‘difficult, serious, intellectual Angst’ rather than (anaphonically) ‘murder by
multiple stabs’ in a (now) popular horror movie.
A less ambiguous genre synecdoche is provided by all those bass pedal points with
simple tunes in compound time that occasionally turn up in works of the European Baroque
period. Such a museme stack, anomalous in the harmonic and rhythmic perpetuum
mobile of the Baroque, was obviously deemed an adequate connotor of central
European country music of the time (style reference) and thereby of the presumedly
idyllic pastorality as shepherds in the field keeping watch over their flocks (genre synecdoche).
The Pastoral Symphonies sections in Händel’s Messiah or J S Bach’s Christmas
Oratorio bear witness to this sort of musical sign type. The genre synecdoche has, in other
words, like the anaphone, a paramusical field of connotation. However, unlike the
anaphone, the genre synecdoche connotes that field, not by direct synaesthetic or struc-
45. Fabbri’s distinction between genre and style can be simplified as follows. A musical style is a set of
musical-structural rules while a musical genre is a larger set of cultural rules that may include musical
style as a subset (Fabbri 1982). Fabbri 1986 contains a radically expanded version of distinctions
between genre and style.

A sign typology of music P Tagg: Introductory notes to the Semiontics of Music 29
tural homology, but by the intermediary of another musical style. The example of Baroque
‘pastoral’ music shows how the ‘home style’ (perpetuum mobile, changing
harmony, circle-of-fifths progressions, etc.) inserts elements from a ‘foreign style’
(drones and simple one-key tunes, etc.) as a reference to phenomena presumed by the
‘home style’s’ audience to be associated with that ‘foreign style’. Since the intermediate
‘foreign’ style is only one part of a larger set of cultural constructs (way of life, attitudes,
perceived environment, clothing, behaviour, etc.) viewed by the ‘home style’s’ audience,
the ‘foreign style’ acts as synecdoche for that larger set. As stated earlier, genre
synecdoches contain two stages of reference: from certain elements in a ‘foreign’ musical
style to the totality of that style and from that style to the rest of the culture to which
that ‘foreign’ style belongs.
Episodic marker
Short one-way processes
The third type of musical sign is the episodic marker. Episodic markers, 46 like all the sign
types presented so far, had to be constructed as a typological concept because of intrinsic
differences is musical semiosis observed in conjunction with empirical data from a
reception test carried out on several hundred respondents in the early eighties. There
is no time to account for that work here, save to say that some pieces of stereotypic but
unknown music used as test battery for eliciting film or TV scenarios gave rise to far
more episodic associations than others. In other words, some pieces elicited lots of
associations like ‘has just’, ‘after that’, ‘after a long time’, ‘about to happen’, ‘leading to’,
etc., while other pieces gave rise to no such episodic connotations. Common musicalstructural
denominators of these apparently more episodic pieces were short, unidirectional
processes along at least one parameter of musical expression, such as short, quick
upbeat, up-bow, initial, rising run-ins to new musical material (e.g. the violin run-up in
Rota’s theme for Romeo and Juliet). Such episodic markers, be they propulsive repetitions
47 like the six-quaver upbeat to the chorus of Abba’s Fernando or the centrifugal
melodic swirls at the start of Johann Strauss’s Fledermaus waltz, or accelerandi or ritardandi
or crescendi or diminuendi, all serve one purpose: as long as they do not continue
forever and as long as they are not immediately annulled by a musical process in
the opposite direction along the same parameter(s) of musical expression, all such episodic
markers act as lead-ins, 48 pointing the musical narrative in the direction of something
new, be it a new theme or a new section, or even the final chord or note, which is,
at least in an intraopus 49 sense, always new, because it can logically only happen once.
Style indicator
Compositional norms
The fourth and final type of musical sign is the style indicator. A style indicator is any
musical structure or set of musical structures that are either constant for or regarded as
typical of the ‘home’ musical style by persons in a culture sporting at least two different
46. This term is derived from the boundary marker of linguistics (See Sinclair and Coulthard: Towards an
Analysis of Discourse. Oxford, 1975). Thanks to Dr. Kay Richardson, University of Liverpool, for this
observation.
47. The ‘ready-steady-go’ principle (see Tagg 1979: **)
48. Anacrusis (pl. anacruses) = upbeat or ‘lead-in’ figure or motif. Neither a crescendo immediately followed
by a diminuendo or vice versa, nor a modulation that returns immediately to the original key
constitute episodic markers: they are like opening the curtains to see what the weather is like and
then closing them within a few seconds rather than like opening the curtains to let the light in for the
rest of the day or closing them for a complete night.
49. Intraopus = inside the musical work.

30 P Tagg: Notes on Semiotics of Music Checklists
musical styles. We are in other words talking about the compositional norms of any given
style. Thus, music using only a very few chords (rarely inverted) but sporting plenty of
vocal and instrumental inflection (of particular types) might be regarded as style indicators
of blues rather than of Viennese classicism, whereas plenty of different chords,
frequently inverted, and very little vocal or instrumental inflection might be regarded
as indicating Viennese classicism rather than blues. Style indicators can, it should be
added, be used by ‘foreign’ musical styles as genre synecdoches. For example, although
the steel guitar sound of Country and Western music acts frequently as a indicator of
the ‘country’ genre, it started its life inside that style as a style reference to the Hawaiian
guitar, i.e. as genre synecdoche for something exotic. Such incorporation of ‘foreign’ elements
into a ‘home’ style is of course part and parcel of musical acculturation, but it
useful to note this distinction, since the same musical element might connote something
quite different to different (groups of) people at different points in time and place
(see ‘Semiosis’, p. 7, ff.).
Checklists
PARAMETERS OF EXPRESSION ARE PROPERLY
WRITTEN UP AND COVERED IN
CHAPTERS 8-12 OF ’Music’s Meanings’
General
When discussing music from a semiotic viewpoint, it is essential to ensure that no aspect
of musical structure is overlooked. This is why a checklist of ‘Parameters of Musical
Expression’ is provided below (p. 31, ff). It is also vital that those parameters and
the musical structures they create are related to the world outside the music, i.e. to the
social and cultural position, intentions, motivations of those producing and using the
music as well as to the functions and acoustic context of the music (‘General aspects of
communication’, p. 30). Moreover, the music under analysis needs to be related to
whatever other forms of expression occur in conjunction with the music as it is used,
e.g. lyrics. pictures, gestures, clothes — the ‘paramusical’ 50 (see ‘Simultaneous paramusical
forms of communication’, p. 31).
General aspects of communication
1. Who is transmitter and who is receiver?
2. What is the physical nature of the channel and where does reception of the music
take place?
3. What social relationship exists between transmitter(s) and receiver(s) of a particular
piece of music (a) in general (b) at the particular occasion of musical communication?
4. What interest and motivation do(es) the receiver(s) have in listening to or otherwise
using the music and what interest and motivation do(es) the transmitter(s)
have in creating and transmitting the music?
5. Is it one- or two-way communication? (Munication or communication?)
6. What technical or sociocultural aspects of coding practice influence the transmitter(s)
in constructing the musical message?
50. ‘Paramusical’, meaning alongside or concurrent with the music, is used instead of the less uncommon
word ‘extramusical’ because the latter means outside the music and because it is both practically and
conceptually problematic to view, say, a pop song‘s lyrics or an underscore’s visual counterpart as
‘outside’ rather than ‘alongside’ the music in conjunction with which they occur.

Checklists P Tagg: Introductory notes to the Semiontics of Music 31
7. What interference (technical, cultural) is the intended message subject to in its passage
in the channel? Do transmitter(s) and receiver(s) have the same store of symbols
and the same sociocultural norms/motivations? What bits of the music (and
its 'message') do(es) the receiver(s) hear, use, respond to?
8. What is/are the intended and actual situation(s) of musical communication for the
music both as a piece and as part of a genre (e.g. dance, home, work, ritual, concert,
meeting, film).
9. What is the attitude of transmitter(s) and receiver(s) in the situation of musical
communication (e.g. attitude of artist or composer to audience, audience's listening
levels, attitudes, activities, behaviour).
10. How is the formation of musical structures affected by 1-9, above?
Simultaneous paramusical forms of cultural expression
1. Paramusical sound, e.g. church bells, background chatter, rattling crockery,
applause, engine hum, birdsong, sound effects.
2. Oral language, e.g. monologue, dialogue, commentary, voice-over, lyrics, etc.
3. Written language, e.g. programme or liner notes, advertising material, title credits,
subtitles, written devices on stage, expression marks and other performance
instructions.
4. Graphics, e.g. typeface, design, layout (cf. 3), computer graphics (TV), etc.
5. Visuals, e.g. photos, moving picture, type of action, scenario, props, lighting, camera
angle and distance, cutting speed and techniques, superimpositions, fades,
zooms, pans, gestures, facial expressions, clothing.
6. Movement, e.g. dance, walk, run, drive, fall, lie, sit, stand, jump, rise, dive, swerve,
sway, slide, glide, hit, stroke, kick, stumble.
7. Venue, e.g. (type of) home, (type of) concert, disco, football match, in front of TV,
cinema, church.
8. Paralinguistics, e.g. vocal type, timbre and intonation of people talking, type and
speed of conversation/dialogue, accent/dialect.
9. Acoustics, i.e. acoustic properties of the place of performance, type and quality of
technical equipment, amount and type of reverb, extraneous noise.
10. The relationship between points 1-9 and the music.
Parameters of musical expression
1. Instrumentational parameters
1.1. Number and type(s) of instruments and/or voices.
1.2. Timbre of instrument and/or voices, e.g. range and ambitus (see 3, below), attack,
envelope, decay, sound spectrum.
1.3. Mechanical devices, e.g. mute, sostenuto pedal, stops, drawbars, plectrum, string
types, reed types, mouthpieces, bows, mallets, sticks, brushes.
1.4. Electroacoustic devices, e.g. microphone types & techniques, loudspeakers, echo,
reverb, delay, panning, filtering, PA systems, mixers, amplifiers, equalizers, phasers,
flangers, chorus, compression, distortion, vocoding, dubs.
1.5. Performance techniques, e.g. vibrato, tremolo, tremolando, glissando, portamento, col
legno, pizzicato, sul ponte, picking, laisser vibrer, strum,
1.6. Phrasing idioms and idiosyncrasies, e.g. attack, legato, staccato.
2. Compositional technique
2.1. Monophonic ↔ polyphonic.
2.2. Monorhythmic ↔ polyrhythmic.
2.3. Homophonic ← heterophonic → contrapuntal.
2.4. Melody-accompaniment or other.

32 P Tagg: Notes on Semiotics of Music Musematic analysis
2.5. Overall texture, e.g. thick, thin, busy, sparse.
3. Temporal parameters
3.1. Duration of piece and relationship of this duration to other connected aspects of communication
(e.g. film, church service, sports event, dancing).
3.2. Duration of sections within the piece and their interrelation.
3.3. Order and treatment of thematic events, e.g. starts, ends, continuations, interruptions,
recurrences (reiterations, repeats, recaps), sequences, inversions, retrogrades, augmentations,
diminutions.
3.4. Pulse, tempo, incl. base rate, surface rate.
3.5. Rhythmic texture, e.g. polyrhythm, birhythm, monorhythm.
3.6. Metre (rhythmic grouping of pulse, time signature, etc.), e.g. simple, compound, symmetric,
asymmetric.
3.7. Accentuation, e.g. onbeat, offbeat, downbeat, upbeat, syncopation, agogics, syllabics,
melismatics.
3.8. Periodicity and phrase length, e.g. long, short, regular, irregular.
4. Tonal parameters
4.1. Tuning system and tonal vocabulary, incl. retuning, detuning, etc.
4.2. Overall and mean pitch range (all parts).
4.3. Pitch range (ambitus) and mean pitch for individual instruments/voices.
4.4. Motivic parameters (incl. melody and bass).
4.4.1. Ambitus, compass.
4.4.2. Contour (e.g. ascending, descending, terraced).
4.4.3. Tonal vocabulary (i.e. scale, mode, etc.).
4.5. Harmonic parameters.
4.5.1. Tonal centre (if any).
4.5.2. Type of tonality (if any), e.g. modal, diatonic, quartal, drone, bebop, impressionist,
late romantic, twelve-tone, etc. Also alterations, inversions, suspensions,
resolutions, etc.
4.5.3. Harmonic change as long and short term phenomenon, incl. harmonic
rhythm (see 3.8) and thematic order (see 3.3).
5. Dynamics parameters
5.1. Loud ↔ soft.
5.2. Sudden ↔ gradual.
5.3. Constant ↔ variable.
Musematic analysis
Concepts and method
MUCH BETTER IN CHAPTER 7
OF ’Music’s Meanings’
What is a museme?
Basic elements of musical signification can be found in the way any item of musical discourse
opts for a certain constellation of positions in the multidimensional complex of
expressional parameters just enumerated. Change along any parameter (e.g. louder,
faster, no melody then melody, first drone then modal harmony, the same thing twice
but not a third time, etc., etc., etc.) implies real or potential change in musical meaning.
Seeger (1960: 76) coined the word museme:
A unit of three components — three tone beats — can constitute two progressions and meet

Musematic analysis P Tagg: Introductory notes to the Semiontics of Music 33
the requirements for a complete, independent unit of music-logical form or mood in both direction
and extension. Both variance and invariance can be exhibited in each of the four simple
functions. It can be regarded as binary and holomorphic — a musical morpheme or
museme.
Seeger’s point, although structural rather than semiotic, is well-taken, especially if you
include (a) the process from no music to the first tone beat as a musematic process; (b)
if you allow for the well-nigh constant contiguity and elision of most musical discourse
(i.e. the last tone beat of one idea is often simultaneously n°1 in the next one). Even so,
Seeger’s ‘museme’ is a problematic concept because, unlike the morphemes of speech,
the semiotic content of musemes is not only influenced by their ‘horizontal’ position
along the irreversible time axis but also by their vertical context, i.e. by everything other
concurrent sound. This requires some clarification.
A morpheme (linguistics) can be defined as
a minimal unit of speech that is recurrent a meaningful… a linguistic form that is not further
divisible without destruction of meaning and is the minimal meaningful unit.
while phonemes are
minimal units of speech distinguishing one utterance from another. 51
Just as replacing the phoneme |b| with |s| changes the morpheme ‘bad’ into ‘sad’,
changing one element in one parameter of musical expression (instrumentation, volume,
first or second of two notes, underlying harmony) can change the ‘meaning’ of,
say, the first two notes of Rule Britannia. But the new note or volume or instrument or
harmony is no musical phoneme because each new element is totally dependent on its
musical context to acquire meaning and cannot be discretised like the phonemes |b| or
|s| or the letters ‘b’ and ‘s’. Music has neither phonemes nor letters. But it does have parameters
of expression that act as constituent forces rather than as discretisable elements
in the construction of units of ‘minimal meaning’ in music.
For example, the well-known guitar riff at the start of Satisfaction (Rolling Stones 1964)
consists of three musemes, all played with distortion on the A string of an electric guitar:
[1] the repeated b (short + long), [2] the quick rise b � c# to a long d, [3] two quick
d-s and back down to b via c# ([2] in reverse elided into [1]). However, that is hardly the
total structure, let alone ‘meaning’, of the riff for the following three reasons: [a] the climax
note d occurs as long suspension over the chord of A and would have had a different
effect if played, for example, over a B 7 chord or continuing E function; [b] Watts has
already started marking onbeats; [c] Wyman has already started plodding quavers to
and fro between E and A. In fact it only really seems meaningful to talk about ‘meaning’
when you consider the whole ‘now’ sound of those first few bars. 52 At the same time,
it is impossible to discuss the signification of the complete museme stack (‘vertical’, simultaneously
sounding set of musemes constituting a ‘now sound’ or ‘present-time
sound’) unless you have some idea about what all its meaningful constituent elements
might have to say. The guitar riff phrase at the start of Satisfaction, without bass and
drums and consisting of the three musemes we mentioned a couple of sentences ago,
is on the other hand a museme string (‘horizontal’, contiguous set of elided musemes)
which acts as a prominent but nevertheless constituent part of the same museme stack
as Wyman’s bass and Watts’s drums. A museme is therefore a minimal unit of musical discourse
that is recurrent and meaningful in itself within the framework of any one musical genre.
This means that the structures constituting a museme in one style do not necessarily
constitute a museme in another style and, even if they did, the museme in question
would not necessarily connote the same thing.
51. Definitions from Pei (1966).
52. From 1 or 2 seconds up to about 10 seconds, depending on the tempo. Cf. Wellek (1963: 107, ff.)

34 P Tagg: Notes on Semiotics of Music Musematic analysis
Intersubjective and interobjective
MUCH BETTER IN CHAPTERS 6 AND 7
OF ’Music’s Meanings’
An account of your own reactions to a piece of music can be called ‘intuitive’, ‘introspective’
or ‘intrasubjective’. For reasons too complex to account for here, arts academe,
from literary criticism to musical ‘analysis’, seems to revel in this approach, while it is
quite unacceptable in social and natural science contexts. This contradiction of approach
is related to the unique type of epistemological schizophrenia from which European
traditions of knowledge seem to have suffered for several centuries, one of
whose symptoms has been that anything to do with aesthetics or feelings are zoned off
into ghettos of art and leisure. Of course, without a ‘gut’ or ‘informed’ personal reaction
to music, without personal preferences, social taste, etc., studying music would not be
much fun. However, socially conditioned personal taste and prejudice in arts academe
has frequently been turned into aesthetic canon, prescribing criteria of artistic value as
though they possessed the same authority as Archimedes’ principle or a papal decree.
Therefore, while it is essential to acknowledge your own reactions to music, it is wise
to treat them as no more than that and to refrain from the use of personal interpretation
as the basis for general statements about musical meaning. Moreover, although music
might be generally thought of as a matter of personal taste, leisure, art, etc., and thereby
seemingly unquantifiable in economic or scientific terms, it should be remembered that
quantification (charts, sales, box office figures, etc.) is the name of much of the game in
the music business and that such quantification relies on many individuals finding the
same sorts of meaning in the same sorts of musical structure.
Since music is a sociocultural as well as an artistic field of study, discussions of musical
meaning must have a substantial degree of concretion outside the values you and the
population(s) you belong to hold as immutable. This type of concretion requires empirical
method, such as that found in intersubjective and interobjective approaches. These
procedures, explained below, can be used to substantiate semiotic observations of the
music you happen to be studying.
Intersubjectivity
It is easy to understand intersubjectivity in terms of a TV advert claiming that nine out
of ten film stars use Brand X soap because they think it’s much kinder to their skin. Obviously,
the advertisers want to sell more of their soap and attempt to do so by trying
to convince people who identify positively with film stars that Brand X is in fact dermatologically
superior to other brands. This sales pitch relies partly on a statement of
intersubjectivity — ‘nine out of ten film stars think that…’
In other words, intersubjectivity depends on the degree to which different subjects (individuals)
relate similarly to the same phenomenon, for example to the feel of a soap
or, more relevantly in this context, to a piece of music, an artist, a musical style, etc. If
different people respond to or say the same sort of thing about the same music, then
that shared similarity of response constitutes an equivalent degree of intersubjective
consistency in relation to that music. 53 Within the social sciences, intersubjectivity is an
approved criterion for validating or falsifying observations, as long as such intersubjectivity
is qualified in terms of (i) number of respondents (subjects), (ii) where, when and
under what conditions the information was gathered, and (iii) appropriate elements of
53. In this text, the word ‘response’ is not used as in experimental psychology (‘stimulus - response’) but
in its everyday meaning.

Musematic analysis P Tagg: Introductory notes to the Semiontics of Music 35
the respondents’ sociocultural habitat, such as age, gender, nationality, education, profession,
etc.
Of course, there are many pitfalls in gathering and collating information of the intersubjective
type. Returning to the Brand X soap advert for a moment, the problems are
obvious. How do we know that a truly representative sample of all film stars were
asked for their opinion? What were the conditions of the survey? Were the film stars
bribed to say something they did not believe or did some of them tell a lie just to gain
media exposure? How guided (or leading) were the questions asked? Were any interviews
conducted and, if so, under what circumstances? How were responses counted,
interpreted and categorised? Since these and other problems of method are left unaddressed,
the validity of the intersubjective statement ‘nine out of ten film stars use
Brand X because they think it’s much kinder to their skin’ must be called into question.
On the other hand, if you are clear about your methods of gathering, interpreting, systematising
and presenting information from respondents, if you accurately describe the
restrictions and parameters of your work, and if you apply a modicum of ethnographical
awareness and critical self reflexivity, the validity of your intersubjective observations
will be unequivocal within those parameters.
Intersubjective strategies can be very useful when it comes to the semiotics of music. It
is, for example, possible to observe and document different uses of the same music by
different individuals or groups of people in different contexts. It is also possible to interview
musicians, listeners, dancers, etc. to find out what they think of the music in
question. You can also gather respondents in one place and play them one or more examples
of music, asking them to provide you with their associations and opinions. Of
course, considerable problems of method arise from these procedures in that the reception
test or interview situation will almost inevitably, though to varying degrees, contradict
the actual reception circumstances of people’s everyday listening habits.
Imagine, for example, interviewing workers in a factory about individual passages or
sonorities disseminated via the company’s background music system, or asking a class
of male high school students to sit still in their desks while writing down associations
to a batch of boisterous grunge metal tunes. The respondent situations just mentioned
contradict normal listening habits and destroy the conditions under which the music in
question is generally used, thereby giving rise to statements about or reactions to music
that may be seriously misleading. It is important to be aware of such difficulties and to
document accurately the means by which you obtain respondent information.
Information from reception studies can be gathered in two ways: (i) observation and
description of behaviour in response to music; (ii) opinions, comments and verbal or
visual associations to music. In either case, you may well end up with what seems to
be, at least in verbal terms, quite a disparate set of responses. Such disparity is to be expected
because, as already mentioned in our discussion of polysemy (p. 8, ff.), precision
of musical meaning does not equal precision of verbal meaning: words and music are
not interchangeable and would not need to exist separately if they were. Nevertheless,
it may be easier to determine common denominators of paramusical response if results
are grouped musicogenically. Therefore, after accounting for blank responses, which
may be significant as intersubjective evidence of musical polysemy, other responses
need ideally to be discretised into their component semantic parts. For example, one respondent
associating to your analysis piece in terms of ‘serious young men, probably
on the dole, wearing grunge clothes, being chased around an abandoned warehouse by
a man in a suit, brandishing a chain saw’ has provided not one but thirteen paramusical
associations to the music (‘serious’, ‘young’, ‘men’, ‘unemployment’, ‘grunge’ /
‘grunge clothes’, ‘chase’, ‘abandoned’, ‘warehouse’, ‘man’, ‘suit’, ‘brandishing’ and
‘chain saw’), whereas another respondent offering ‘boring eighties video in urban de-

36 P Tagg: Notes on Semiotics of Music Musematic analysis
cay’ has only offered five (‘boring’, ‘1980s’, ‘video’, ‘urban’, ‘decay’). Since both respondents
come from a similar background and since they are reacting to the same
music, it is reasonable to regard ‘abandoned warehouse’ and ‘urban decay’ as part of
the same paramusical semantic field. It would also be useful to know how many respondents
associated to ‘grunge’ or the ‘eighties’, how many mentioned some kind of
social decay (e.g. unemployment) or violence (e.g. ‘chase’, ‘brandish’, ‘chain saw’).
A useful second step in systematising responses is to divide them into three basic categories:
[1] opinions, such as ‘boring’, ‘great music’, ‘bad taste’, etc; [2] intramusical associations,
including musical works, styles and structural traits, as well as artists,
composers, instruments, etc; [3] all other responses. Responses of type 2 are useful for
interobjective comparison purposes (p. 36, ff.), while those of type 1, although of little
direct relevance to the analysis of musical signification, may cast light on patterns of response
at a later stage. 54 Responses of type 3 — all others — will of course need further
categorisation. Whether observing behaviour in response to music or dealing with verbal
and visual associations to music, a basic response taxonomy can be quite useful (see
p. 44, ff.).
There are two main advantages in using intersubjective observation in music semiotics:
(i) it allows you to state that a certain proportion of a certain body of people at a certain
time under certain conditions in a certain sociocultural context responded in a certain
way to certain music; (ii) it calls for no musicological expertise whatsoever. Intersubjective
observation provides vital information on many aspects of the basic communication
process (fig. 1, p. 10) in relation to a particular body of music, especially in terms
of reception and response. It also allows you to posit viable hypotheses about the ‘intended
message’, as well as about which structural elements within the ‘channel’ may
or may not be related to which responses to the music. This final aspect — relating observations
about musical reception to structural elements — requires considerable familiarity
on the analyst’s part with the musical object giving rise to all those
intersubjectively shared patterns of response. It is in this context that an interobjective
approach comes in handy in helping us discover how particular patterns of musical
structuration relate to particular patterns of response.
Interobjectivity
If an analytical approach establishing consistency of response to the same piece of music
played to different listeners is called intersubjective, then an interobjective approach
is one which establishes consistency of structure between different pieces of music.
While intersubjective inquiry allows you to relate a piece of music in general to a set of
responses to that music, the procedure of interobjective comparison relates a particular
piece of music to other pieces of music.
Now, relating music to other music may seem like a futile exercise because, at least in
academic circles, only verbal and numeric symbols appear to own any validity as metalanguage.
We would, in other words, seem to be no closer to an explanation of what
the music under analysis is communicating. However, as we have already observed (p.
18, points 2-3), musical discourse possesses a degree of relative autonomy. This means
that although music is most definitely related to society, in that it is so obviously connects
with phenomena outside its own discourse, it also actually refers to itself on its
own terms. In fact, people in the process of making music are far more influenced by
54. For example, if there is significant intersubjective agreement that a piece is boring and if the music in
question also elicits a large number of blank responses, then those respondents may well be unfamiliar
with the store of symbols operating in that music (codal incompetence) or opposed to the sociocultural
norms encoded in the music (codal interference). Of course, codal incompetence or interference
may be equally in operation at the transmitting end.

Musematic analysis P Tagg: Introductory notes to the Semiontics of Music 37
music, either as intraopus context or as other music, than by anything else: their memory
of music is reinforced by the relationship of particular sounds to particular patterns
of bodily activity — voice, hands, fingers, arms, lips, lungs, legs, etc. — that they use to
produce those sounds. Bearing in mind such training, experience and socialisation patterns,
it would be surprising if musicians thought of anything much apart from music
when making and/or hearing it. Ignoring these logistics of musical cognition would be
tantamount to ignoring essential aspects of musical communication. Therefore, if this
text is to present viable methods of semiotic music analysis, the importance of interobjective
procedures needs to be emphasised.
Nevertheless, it would still be perfectly legitimate to object that relating music to music
and nothing else will result in the same vicious circle of ‘absolute’ aesthetics that has
dogged music theory and analysis teaching at most higher education institutions for a
very long time. Fortunately, the interobjective procedure explained below is a means to
an end, not an end in itself. Relating the structures of one musical work to those of others
serves in fact two purposes in addition to acknowledging simple facts of life about
musical cognition. Firstly, it allows for consistency of structural recurrence to be established,
an essential step in the understanding of any type of signification. Secondly, the
establishment of structural recurrence can lead to the collection of a body of structurally
similar musical works, some of which share common traits other than structural similarity.
These two essential aspects of interobjective comparison method require further
explanation.
The importance of structural recurrence in semiotics can be easily grasped by linguistic
analogy. For example, the morpheme |wi:| has various meanings: [1] the word ‘we’ as
(a) nominative pronoun in the first person plural, as in ‘we go to lunch at 12.30’, (b) the
royal ‘we’, as in Queen Victoria’s statement ‘we are not amused’, (c) the matronising
‘we’, as in ‘been a naughty boy again, have we?’ [2] the Lowland Scottish word ‘wee’,
meaning small; [3] the English children’s word ‘wee’, meaning urinate; [4] the interjection
‘wee’ either associated with flying, swinging, diving, etc. or as onomatopoeia for
squealing piglets, as in ‘this little piggy cried “wee, wee, wee” all the way home’; [5] the
French word ‘oui’, meaning yes, etc., etc. It is patent that none of these meanings of |wi:|
can be demonstrated to exist without first establishing that |wi:| actually regularly recurs
as a discretisable unit of spoken language in instances such as those just cited.
Moreover, each different meaning, or nuance of meaning, associated with |wi:| needs to
be related to other aspects of linguistic structure (e.g. syntax, stress, dialect) that enable
us to distinguish between the |wi:| of ‘We three kings of Orient are’, ‘Mary’s just a wee
bairn’ and ‘Oui, je t’aime’. Finally, these other aspects of linguistic structure in combination
with |wi:| need to be established as regularly recurrent in other utterances so that
‘we go to lunch at 12.30’ can be demonstrated as structurally similar to ‘we three kings
of Orient are’ but not to ‘wee bairns’ or ‘wee beasties’ which, in their turn, can be structurally
distinguished from the structural similarities between ‘oui, je t’aime’ and ‘elle
m’a dit “oui”’.
Although we have already noted important qualitative differences between musical
and verbal signification, the general point of structural recurrence just presented is just
as applicable to the discussion of musical as verbal meaning. No serious discussion of
musical signification can in other words take place if the structures posited as carrying
connotations cannot be shown to exist elsewhere than in the one musical utterance under
analysis. For example, if you observe the minor key as an important trait in the music
you are trying to analyse, you will, as we shall see later (p. 39), need to establish
structural recurrence not so much of the minor key in other pieces of music as of the
minor key performed in a certain metre at a certain tempo by certain instruments in a
certain way in a certain musical idiom.

38 P Tagg: Notes on Semiotics of Music Musematic analysis
The second reason for underlining the importance of interobjective procedures in the
semiotic analysis of music is that the establishment of structural recurrence leads to the
collection of a body of structurally similar musical works, some of which may share
common traits other than structural similarity. Such a collection of structurally similar
musical works is called Interobjective Comparison Material (IOCM for short) and the paramusical
similarities between them may be demonstrably related to particular words,
movements, moods, sensations, sounds, sociocultural functions, historical or ethnic locations,
etc., in fact to any of the ‘simultaneous paramusical forms of cultural expression’
listed above (p. 31). It is in these ways that interobjective procedures do not so
much avoid the vicious circle of musical ‘absolutism’ as use music’s self-referentiality
as a means of strengthening semiotic argumentation according to the conditions of musical
cognition rather than those of (verbal) language.
The initial stages of interobjective comparison are best carried out without too much verbalisation,
i.e. by racking your own musical memory for pieces containing sounds similar
to those in the music you are trying to analyse. The checklist of musical parameters
(p. 31) will help you focus on particular aspects of the sounds involved and may also
jog your musical memory to think of pieces containing a particular combination of
sounds: it could be a melodic turn of phrase, a particular type of instrumentation or
timbre, a particular vocal quality, a particular drum pattern at a particular tempo, a
chord progression, a particular type of spatial acoustics, etc., etc. After noting your own
intramusical associations, it is a good idea to rack other people’s tactile and gestural
memory for snippets they recognise and have played, sung, heard or danced to. Interobjective
comparison is in this sense an intersubjective process too, so that the larger
the number of people you ask for musical associations, the larger and more reliable
your IOCM will be.
As mentioned earlier, musicians’ memory of music is reinforced by the particular patterns
of gestural activity they use to produce particular sounds in a particular order and
manner. This aspect of musician memory can be used to great advantage in the collection
of IOCM. (If you are not a musician, perhaps the easiest way to understand this
type of tactile or gestural memory is, without thinking, to dial a familiar phone number
or to enter your personal ATM code in the palm of your hand. 55 If you have dialled the
phone number or withdrawn money often enough, your hand and fingers will remember
a shape and a gesture corresponding to the correct sequence of keys without your
having to recite the numbers in the right order.)
If you encourage musicians to play or sing along to an extract of music whose symbolic
value you are trying to establish and then ask them if they have played or sung anything
resembling that extract in any other piece of music, the gestural activity involved
in playing or singing along may then prompt them to recall a similar passage for which
a similar musical-gestural pattern was required in a different musical context. If you are
fortunate, the musicians may even identify other pieces of music in which that similar
musical gesture occurs. This procedure of asking musicians for their musical associations
should increase the size and structural viability of your IOCM.
The next stage of interobjective comparison entails checking whether the various pieces
of IOCM you have collected bear more than structural resemblance to each other. This
process involves looking for instances of paramusical expression (see p. 31, ff.) that different
pieces within your IOCM may share in common. Do any of the pieces have similar
titles? Are they associated with similar types of narrative or choreography? Do they
have similar lyrics or voice-overs? Do they appeal to similar types of audience? Are
55. UK readers please note that by ‘ATM’ (automatic teller machine) is meant a cashpoint and by ‘personal
code’ a PIN (personal identity number).

Musematic analysis P Tagg: Introductory notes to the Semiontics of Music 39
there any similarities in visual presentation? Are they related in terms of ethnic or
acoustic location? Are they used in similar sociocultural contexts? Answering this sort
of question might lead you to conclude that several pieces of IOCM are connected with,
say, heroes and men of action, or with green rolling hills and nuclear family sentiment,
or with space horror and doomsday laser cannons, or with yuppie UK lager louts of the
late 1980s, or with wide open spaces and lost innocence, or with the seedier side of aerobic
disco, glossy lipstick, towelling headbands and pastel-shaded leg-warmers.
The most obvious pitfall in interobjective comparison occurs when you discover two
similarly structured snippets of music that ‘mean’ entirely different things in different
contexts. For example, although the first phrase of the Hallelujah chorus from Händel’s
Messiah may sound the same as the start of Yes We Have No Bananas, the two tunes obviously
do not communicate the same thing to the same audience. Similarly, a 13th
chord does not ‘mean’ the same in romantic opera as in bebop, nor does the minor key
‘mean’ the same in What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor as in Chopin’s Marche funèbre.
These problems of interobjectivity can be avoided if interobjective comparison is restricted
as much as possible to the same sort of music in the same sort of intramusical
and sociomusical context. Just as no-one would presume the word ‘bad’ to mean the
same thing to the head teacher of a British private school as to a Los Angeles gang member,
or just as the sound |wi:| has at least three different meanings in English according
to context, and a completely different meaning in French, no musical structure can be
assumed to carry the same value in different musical idioms or social contexts (see p.
37).
Bearing in mind these caveats, it is feasible, once a bank of IOCM has been collected and
discussed in terms of both structural and paramusical similarity, to posit that the paramusical
fields of association shared in common by the IOCM elicited from your analysis
object are also connotatively relevant to the same, or similar, structures found in that
analysis object. In this way the process of interobjective comparison constitutes a method
of discussing the connotative signification of a certain set of musical structures by
the use of other music as a cognitively apposite intermediary.

40 P Tagg: Notes on Semiotics of Music Musematic analysis
Hypothetical substitution (commutation)
[This section to be substantially expanded]
SEE CHAPTER 7 IN ’Music’s Meanings’
If you think that a particular museme (or set of musemes) is particularly operative in
creating particular connotations in the music you are analysing, you can always test
your theory by means of commutation or hypothetical substitution. You just replace
whatever structural element you think is semiotically important in creating the connotations
in question with something else. For example, you can put the passage under
discussion into the minor key if it’s in the major (or vice versa), you can replace massed
brass band with solo violin, you can change the interval, the phrasing, the tempo, or
whatever you think it takes to give the music under analysis a totally different character.
If changing the interval or instrumentation or whatever seems to make no difference,
then the parameters under change are unlikely to be connotatively operative; if,
on the other hand, you change, say, the reverb time or transpose the backing vocals
down an octave, perhaps you will find that the connotative difference is huge, in which
case those parameters of expression are almost certain to be operative in creating the
connotations you have established through interobjective comparison as related to
your museme.
The melody-accompaniment dualism
[This section to be substantially expanded]
THIS IS ALL DEALT WITH PROPERLY IN CHAPTER 12
OF ’Music’s Meanings’
Melody
Since at least 1600 and until the advent of rave dance music (especially techno), the basic
compositional paradigm of most European and North American music has been the
melody-accompaniment dualism. It is what Haydn and AC/DC share in common, so
to speak. It is by no means a universal phenomenon. Most West African traditional music,
for instance, is based on the completely different principle of polyrhythm while
much Arabic music is heterophonic.
Melody has been defined as:
a succession of musical tones, as contrasted with harmony, i.e. musical tones sounded simultaneously.
Thus, melody and harmony represent the horizontal and the vertical elements of
musical texture.
Harvard Dictionary of Music
A succession of tones characterised by their total or partial appearance as a musical Gestalt,
an integral structure (possibly standing out as a figure against an accompanying background).
It stands out with such clarity as to be recognisable and reproducible.
Ingmar Bengtsson in Sohlmans Musiklexikon
The operative words here are ‘Gestalt’ (figure), ‘standing out against’, ‘recognisable’
and ‘reproducible’. Since many people play no instrument, the most common way of
reproducing melodies is to sing them. This is perhaps why melodies are not just recognisable
little motivic figures like riffs (ostinati) or fillers, but the most consistently identifiable
and singable strings of tones: tones at a singable pitch containing singable
intervals within a singable range. Melody tends also to be singable in terms of phrase
length (breathing) and surface rate tempo (not too many fast notes, not just one or two
very long notes).

Musematic analysis P Tagg: Introductory notes to the Semiontics of Music 41
Accompaniment
‘Accompaniment’ on the other hand is generally qualified as being ‘subordinate’ to
some other part of the musical texture and is defined by the Harvard Dictionary as
the musical background provided by a less important for a more important part.
while Bengtsson (op. cit.) makes quite clear that accompaniment exists in a subordinate
background relationship to the main voice or melody. You could also say that
the ‘generality’ of accompanying parts are musically understood as contrasting
with the ‘particularity’ of the melody. Terms like ‘backing’ and ‘backing vocals’,
‘lead singer’, ‘lead vocals’, etc. emphasise this consensus about the dualism. In fact,
as the focal centre point in figure 2 shows, the lead singer, main soloist, conductor
of a symphony orchestra, etc., i.e. of the most important human figure with whom
the audience is supposed to identify is located centre stage front, not backstage or
in the wings. This is even true of pop record panning practices.
Fig. 2: Monocentric
musical
positioning
As Maróthy (1974: 22) suggests, the dualism of melody
and accompaniment has played a major part in Western
music. In fact this compositional paradigm can be compared
to the figure/ground dualism of European painting
since the Renaissance, a dualism that replaced the ‘polycentric’
works of artists like Bosch and Breughel with a
monocentric relationship using techniques of central perspective
(from Massacre of the Innocents or Children's Games
to Mona Lisa or Vermeer’s still life works). It seems probable
that this change in the visual arts was paralleled in European
art music’s shift from ecclesiastical polyphony (e.g.
Palestrina) to secular monody (e.g. Monteverdi) and that
this shift is related to the rise of bourgeois notions of individual
emancipation. Seen in this light as a structural ho-
mology for a (then) new concept of human personality, the melody-accompaniment
dualism, though definitely not a museme, can be said to carry meaning in itself. This is
important to bear in mind when discussing the meaning of musical structures, since
connotations are not only constructed at the micro (musematic) level but also by the
processes created by repetitions, recapitulation, variation, block shifts, etc., i.e. by the
music’s formal order of events.
Extras
NOT AT ALL EXTRAS!
SEE CHAPTER 7 IN ’Music’s Meanings’!

42 P Tagg: Notes on Semiotics of Music Musematic analysis
Fig. 3: Hermeneutic correspondence by means of interobjective comparison
AO analysis object
IOCM interobjective comparison
material
PMFA paramusical field
of association
AO
IMC
AO
PMFA
objective states of correspondence
demonstrable states of correspondence
IOCM
IMC
IOCM
PMFA

Musematic analysis P Tagg: Introductory notes to the Semiontics of Music 43
Fig. 4: Methodological paradigm for analysis of affect in popular music. 56.
HERMENEUTIC SEMIOTIC
IDEOLOGICAL
Emitter – interests,
needs and aims
comments on aims
Emitter – interests,
needs and functions
SCFS
Sociocultural
field of study
Access problem:
select method and material
music ν musicγ music υ
AO
IMC
PMFA
PMP
PPMP
Musical ‘channel’ Receiver – interests,
needs and aims
HypotheticalSubstitution
verbalisation
music φ
IOCM
IMC
PMFA
PMP
PPMP
music analysed
in explicit terms comments on reactions
AO as expression of relationships
Emitter - Receiver
Emitter - SCFS
Receiver - SCFS
AO - SCFS
SCFS
AO = analysis object
IOCM = interobjective comparison material
HS = hypothetical substitution
IMC = item of musical code
PMFA =paramusical fields of association
PMP = patterns of musical process
PPMP = patterns of paramusical process
SCFS =sociocultural field of study
music ν = music as conception (n“ow = thought, purpose, mind)
music γ = music as notation (gr„fv = write)
music υ = music as sounding object ( œlh = matter as opposed to mind)
musicν = music as perception ( fa§nomai = appear, seem)
Receiver – interests,
needs and functions
56. Thanks to Sven Andersson, Institute for the Theory of Science, University of Göteborg, for help in
constructing this model.

44 P Tagg: Notes on Semiotics of Music Abbreviated taxonomy of PMFAs PMFCs
Abbreviated taxonomy of PMFAs PMFCs
THIS IS COVERED MUCH BETTER IN
CHAPTER 6 OF ’Music’s Meanings’
General attributive affects
This section includes all general descriptions of feeling, mood, sensation, size, colour,
tactility.
Culturally ambivalent, i.e. descriptive of an affect that a general consensus would probably
determine as neither clearly positive nor clearly negative within the culture to
which you belong. This category includes [1] relative dynamism: excitement, drama,
emotion, feelings, involvement, challenge, action, adventure, intense, complicated, different,
varying, irregular; [2] relative stasis: familiar, neutral, ordinary; unagressive;
simple; regular; [3] reflection, sentimentality, lyricism; [4] determination: confident, deliberate;
definite, destiny; [5] abandon: uncontrolled; ecstasy, passion; [6] balance, control,
serious; [7] humour: comedy; jokes; irony; [8] cultural dominance: important,
prestigious; grandiose; sophisticated; [9] cultural emergence; bravado; ‘cool’; flashy,
hip; rebellious
Culturally positive, i.e. descriptive of affect that a general consensus would probably determine
as positive within the culture to which you belong. This category includes [1]
general: good, pleasant positive; delightful; confident, encouraging, hope; [2] love,
kindness: friendly, loving; romance; sensual; gentle; kind; [3] tranquillity, security:
peace; still, calm; protected; harmonious; easy, relaxed; [4] joy, festivity: elated, happy,
carefree, fun, festive; [5] beauty, attraction: enchanting; impressive; elegant; shapely;
[6] lightness, brightness, openness, freshness; [7] strength, pride, success: brave, heroic;
independent; [8] wisdom, trust, justice; [9] order: correct; tidy; efficient
Culturally negative, i.e. descriptive of affect that a general consensus would probably determine
as negative within the culture to which you belong. This category includes [1]
general: bad, nasty, wrong, unpleasant; [2] enmity, aggression, implacability: hate, anger,
revenge, inhuman, hostile, cruel, violent; [3] disturbance, danger: unrest; difficulties,
problems; confused, frustrated, worried; strained; menacing, ominous; agitation,
stress; [4] sadness, boredom: disappointment, despondency, misery; tragedy, sorrow;
languishing; dejection, abandonment, loneliness; boring, listless; pessimistic; [5] ugliness,
repulsion: disgust; creepy; crude; gaudy; [6] darkness, encumbrance, clandestinity,
miasma: gloom, shady, stealth; heavy; confined, stuffy; worn out; ill; decadent,
dirty; death; drugged; [7] weakness, fear, failure: doubtful; uncertain; miserly; [8] madness,
futility, suspicion: ridiculous, stupid; futile; guilt, jealousy; [9] disorder: mess,
chaos, shambles, state of flux; [10] asociality: criminal, robbery, prostitution, smuggling
Culturally neutral, i.e. descriptive of affect that a general consensus would probably determine
as neutral within the culture to which you belong. This category includes [1]
asperity: rough, hard, tough, tight, steep, jagged, bitter, dry; [2] mollity: smooth, mild,
soft, curved, loose, sweet, humid; [3] heat: glowing, warm; [4] cold: cool, freezing; [5]
largeness: great, immense, broad, high, long, full, more and more, total; [6] smallness:
little, tiny, narrow, low, short, decreasing, private; [7] density: compact, crowded, deep;
[8] sparsity: empty, shallow; [9] colour: multicoloured, black and white; blue; green;
yellow; red, etc.
Beings, props, gatherings.
This section includes all foreground figures (humans, animals, objects), as well as gatherings
and groups of both humans and animals.

Abbreviated taxonomy of PMFAs PMFCs P Tagg: Introductory notes to the Semiontics of Music 45
General, incl. human, male, female
One human, incl. [1] either sex: a figure, a person, alone, he or she, I, man or woman,
someone; child, middle-aged person; best friend; [2] single male: he, boy, man, cowboy,
detective, hero, villain, mayor, father, named male; [3] single female: she, girl, woman,
lady, named female.
Two humans, incl. [1] either sex: me and you, both of them; two old people; [2] two
males: two men, two buddies, etc; [3] two females: two women, two girls, etc; [4] male
and female: he and she, young couple, the newly-weds, Romeo & Juliet, etc.
Several humans, incl. [1] either sex: people, they, company (people); teenagers; adults;
old people; delinquents; students; truck drivers; ghosts, trolls; [2] males: young boys,
his sons, old men, marines, etc; [3] females: women, ballerinas, team (female basketball);
[4] many humans: crowd, many people, many children, audience, etc.
Couture, props. This section includes [1] parts of the body and other bodily references;
[2] clothes; [3] furniture and domestic fixtures; [4] food, drink, etc; [5] vehicles; [6] tools,
weapons and appliances; [7] stones and metal; [8] money and paper; [9] mortal remains
Social activity, including [1] general: culture, society, ritual, etc; [2] festive, celebratory:
party, carnival, Christmas, anniversary, commemoration; [3] presentational: performance,
on stage; procession, parade; circus; fashion show; [4] sports; [5] military: regiment;
battle, war; air force, army, etc; [6] recreational: leisure, entertainment, holidays,
excursion; [7] economic: business, easy money, East India Company, etc; [8] educational:
college, school, academy; [9] religious: Methodist, Catholic, fundamentalist, Salvation
Army, Shiite, etc.
Domesticated animals, including [1] pets; [2] livestock; [3] horses etc; [4] birds
Other animals, including [1] predatory mammals; [2] flock animals; [3] birds; [4] aquatic
animals; [5] fish
Location, scene, setting
This section contains references to physical, social, and historical scenarios or environments.
General setting, including [1] general: at home, local area; abroad, exotic location; heaven;
hell; [2] outdoors: outside; [3] indoors, subterranean: room; bar, club; hall, ballroom;
basement, tunnel; bedroom, etc; [4] buildings (inside): house; concert venue; palace;
cabin; cathedral, church, mosque
Rural setting, incl. [1] general: country(side), nature; pastoral, bucolic; [2] campestral:
grass, meadows, fields; [3] edificial (from outside): hut, cabin; farm, ranch; castle, manor;
village; [4] undulant: valleys, hills; [5] sylvan: trees; woods; forest; [6] horticultural:
greenery; garden; flowers; lawn; [7] fluvial, lacustrine: river; beck; creek; lake
‘Big’ nature (panoramic or ‘un-man-made’ nature), incl. [1] general: broad view, panorama,
big country, open spaces; [2] flat: plain; heath, moor; prairie, steppe; savanna; [3]
mountainous: highlands, Alps; [5] barren: wild country; desert; tundra; [6] tropical:
jungle; palm trees
Aqueous, aerial, incl. [1] pelagic: ocean, sea; [2] littoral: coast, shore, by the sea, beach,
islands; [3] aerial: air, clouds, sky
Miscellaneous outdoors, incl. [1] natural: leaves; cliffs; dust; clouds of sand; [2] artefactual:
paths; roads; highways; railways; bridges
Urban location, incl. [1] general: city, town; concrete jungle; large town; small town; [2]
thoroughfares: alley; street; market place; public square; [3] quartiers: suburbs; chic areas;
slums; red light district; [4] urban buildings and locations: factories; skyscrapers;

46 P Tagg: Notes on Semiotics of Music Abbreviated taxonomy of PMFAs PMFCs
supermarkets; airports; [5] traffic; [6] miscellaneous: street lights, neon; outdoor adverts;
asphalt, concrete
Sociocultural location, incl. [1] upper, rich, snob, royal, etc; [2] middle class; [3] lower,
poor people, working class
Geographical and/or ethnic location, including [1] Northwestern Europe; [2] Mediterranean
Europe; [3] Eastern Europe and the Balkans; [4] Near and Middle East; [5] Indian
subcontinent; [6] East Asia; [7] North America; [8] Central and South America; [9] Oceania;
[10] other regions
Historical location, incl. [1] generally in the past: old days, historical; [2] prehistoric; [3]
ancient; [4] medieval; [5] renaissance, baroque; [6] 18th century; [7] 19th century; [8]
decades in 20th century; [9] contemporary, modern; [10] future time, tomorrow’s world
Weather, season, time of day, incl. [1] weather: fine, nice weather, sunshine; sunrise, sunset;
moon(light); fog, haze; storms; wind, breeze; rain; ice, snow; [2] season: spring;
summer; autumn; winter; [3] time of day: dawn, early morning; daytime; evening, twilight;
night
Synoptic and episodic time
Synoptic time, i.e. relation to formal time position outside an imagined narrative. This
category includes [1] beginning: overture, start, main titles, introduction; [2] middle:
scene, episode, break in action, interlude; [3] end: finale, final scene, dénouement, end
titles
Episodic time, i.e. relation to events within an imagined narrative, including [1] future:
about to (happen), going to (do), not yet, being announced, soon, (something) is expected,
consequences, leading to, etc; [2] present: at this moment, has just started; switches
to; after which; changes mood; meanwhile, etc; [3] past: has just …, finally, …has happened;
after a long time; used to (do), etc.
Explicit space-time relations, movements and acts
This section contains references to the relative positions of objects or beings, their type
and speed of movement, and their type and nature of action or interaction.
General: movement; actions
Essive relations, incl. [1] inessive: among/in, between, in middle of; [2] superessive:
above, overhead, on high; [3] subessive: below, underneath; [4] retroessive: behind; [5]
preessive: in front; [6] circumessive: around
Velocity, simultaneity, incl. [1] low speed: slow, gradual; covering a long time [2] high
speed: fast, quick; sudden; momentary, immediate; [3] simultaneity: at same time
Non-specified movement, specific direction, i.e. connotations specifying the direction of objects
or beings in relation to a subjective camera or microphone within the imagined
narrative, without specifying other aspects of the movement. This category includes [1]
adventive: approach, arrive, coming; enter, appear; from elsewhere; meet, towards
each other; return, come home; [2] exitive: en route to, going to …; find, explore, search;
away from (here), depart, escape, set off; goodbye, part, separate, leave; [3] transitional:
pass, past (by); along, forwards, between, through; [4] ascending: rise, from below;
open up, open out; [5] descending: fall, sink, from above; [6] circular: circling, enveloping,
gather round
Oscillatory movement, i.e. relatively constant and recurrent movement round and round,
to and fro, etc., without any specified single direction of the object moving in such a
way. This category includes [1] curvilinear: rolling, undulating; wafting, waving, billowing,
swaying; round and round, spinning, whirling; [2] tremulous: trembling; glit-

Abbreviated taxonomy of PMFAs PMFCs P Tagg: Introductory notes to the Semiontics of Music 47
tering, quivering, sparkling; babbling; flickering, fluttering, trickling; bustling, rustling,
busy; [3] pulsating: throbbing; flashing; again and again
Prolapsual or volitative movement in unspecified direction, i.e. relatively frictionless movement
associated with slipping, sliding, gliding, floating, etc. in air, gas or liquid. This
category includes: [1] flowing, running (of liquid); [2] floating, gliding, slipping (by),
sliding; [3] flying, soaring, hovering; [4] sailing
Other specific movement in unspecified direction, e.g. [1] constant: gleaming, shining; [2]
eruptive, tumescent, torrential: brimming over, bursting forth; gushing, surging, rearing;
breaking out; [3] pedestrian: on foot, walking, wandering, strolling; running;
marching; trotting, galloping; [4] vehicular: travel, transport; cruising, cycling, driving
(vehicle); horse riding; canoeing, rowing; [5] ludic: playing music/games; dancing;
hop, skip, jump; swimming, skiing, skating
Stationary acts, e.g. [1] motionless: waiting; [2] quiescent: resting, sleeping; [3] sedentary:
sitting; [4] upright: standing, at attention
Interactive, i.e. acts and movements involving one or more beings or objects, or involving
the reflexive activity of one being, for example [1] appreciative, affectionate, celebratory:
‘I love you’; caress, embrace; kiss, make love; smile; laugh; celebrate, salute; [2]
conflictive, coercive, contusive: conflict; against, beat hit; break, crash, pierce, smash;
attack, fight, struggle; hassle, provoke, terrorise; hurt, wound; shoot; kill, murder; conquer;
[3] cogitative, intentional: think, ponder, wonder; dream, marvel; long for, want
to; decide, plan, plot, solve; look back, recognise, remember, recall; trying to; console,
reconcile; misunderstand; [4] transferential: drag, drive, pull, push; bring, fetch, take;
chase, follow; fill up; [5] symbolic communication: show, expose; gesticulate, wave
(hand); look, glance, see, watch; ask, discuss, speak, listen, talk; whisper; groan, moan;
cry, mourn, sigh; growl, shout; sing, hum; scream, yell; plead; touch; read; [6] culinary:
eat, drink, cook, fry
Media immanence
This section contains references to the qualities of the music heard, or to other musical
practices resembling the music heard, or to visual and/or verbal media phenomena
connoted by the music, or the envisaged audience of the music and/or of its imagined
audiovisual accompaniment.
Musical references, including [1] genres and styles: film music, classical music, ballet, opera,
jazz, heavy metal, Muzak, etc; [2] musical instruments: brass band, rock band, symphony
orchestra, clarinet, grand piano; [3] musicians: bass player, pianist, Guns and
Roses, Beethoven; [4] concepts of musical structure: tune, rhythm, difficult chords, minor
key; [5] sound treatment parameters: reverb, echo, delay, etc; [6] named musical
works (IOCM)
Non-musical references, including [1] cinematic: film version; Hollywood; silent movie;
Hitchcock; The Godfather; [2] TV: TV version; MTV; The Simpsons, etc; [3] adverts and
video; [4] radio: commercial radio, pirate radio, BBC Radio One, etc; [5] verbal media:
books, periodicals, novels, poetry, theatre
Target groups, e.g. [1] for children, for young people; [2] family entertainment; [3] for the
over-sixties
Non-music genres, e.g. [1] cartoon, farce, comedy, pastiche; [2] detective, spy, film noir;
[3] education programme, documentary; [4] melodrama, soap opera, family saga; [5]
love story, romance; [6] thriller, mystery, horror; science fiction; [7] Western
Visual production techniques, e.g. close-up; zoom-in, zoom-out; aerial shot; cut-in; studio
shot; fast cuts; (visual) pan, etc.

48 P Tagg: Notes on Semiotics of Music Bibliography
Production origin, incl. [1] nationality of production: USA, Sweden, Australia, Italy, etc;
[2] production vintage: 1940s production, very old film, recent production, etc.
Evaluative comments
This section contains listener opinions of the music heard and of its probable functions
Good taste, incl. enjoyable, good tune, well made, well produced
Bad taste, incl. [1] bad, awful, terrible, boring; [2] unconvincing, shoddy, contrived, badly
produced, cheap, trite; [3] impersonal, innocuous; [4] nonsensical, no content, ludicrous;
[5] pompous, overproduced; [6] cloying, tacky, syrupy
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